Staff Design Engineer

About the role

At Mixpanel, we believe design excellence is a competitive moat. In a world where AI makes it easier than ever to ship, we believe the quality of the experience — how it feels, how it builds trust, how it handles complexity with grace — that separates good products from great ones.

As a Staff Design Engineer at Mixpanel, you'll sit within the design organization and lead the transformation of our design system from a component library into something far more important: the infrastructure that powers how we design, build, and ship in an AI-native world. You'll encode our craft, standards, and vision directly into the systems, tools, and workflows that every designer, engineer, and AI agent in our org builds on.

This isn't a maintenance or systems stewardship role. It's a transformative one. You'll work at the frontier of what design and engineering collaboration looks like when AI writes most of the code, agents prototype from intent, and the design system is less a library and more a living foundation for everything we ship.

You'll be the designer who ships production code. The engineer who holds an uncompromising craft bar. The person who sees the future of how Mixpanel will look and behave in an AI-native world, and builds the infrastructure to make it real.

What you'll do

Build the infrastructure for an AI-native design practice

Translate Mixpanel's design standards, principles, and taste into systems that live in the code. Build a token system, component library, documentation, and guidelines that AI agents, AI coding tools, and AI prototyping workflows can reliably build on. Evolve our design system to be foundational infrastructure for AI-assisted workflows.

Shape how Mixpanel looks and behaves in an AI-native world

Sit within the product design team and collaborate on reimagining Mixpanel for a world where interfaces are conversational, agentic, and adaptive. You have the rare combination of deep design sensibility and production engineering skills, and you’ll use both to help bring our AI product vision to life with craft and coherence that generic AI outputs can't match.

Own the bridge between design and code

Build systems that connect design to code and keep the two in sync. Define what "shippable" looks like as AI writes more of the code. Work directly in the codebase. Ship PRs that improve the product. Make design a force multiplier for engineering, not a bottleneck.

Stand up prototyping and AI tooling infrastructure

Build the workflows, tools, and infrastructure that let designers and PMs prototype at high fidelity, with working code, real components, and interactive states, without waiting on engineering. Identify the places where design and engineering lose time, intent, or quality in the handoff, and build AI-powered workflows that close those gaps.

Set and model the craft bar

Establish what great looks like — not through documentation alone, but through the quality of what you ship. Enable designers to work more code-adjacent and engineers to build with better components. Stay ahead of how AI is changing EPD workflows and bring that change into the org responsibly.

What success looks like

• The design system is a reliable foundation that AI tools and agents build on, not an obstacle they work around
• Design and code are in sync; the gap between what's designed and what ships is closed
• Designers can prototype at high fidelity without waiting on engineering
• Engineers spend less time on UI polish and rework, more time on features
• The Mixpanel product feels unmistakably itself — cohesive, expressive, and craft-forward — as it evolves into an AI-native experience
• The org is enabled on the latest AI-assisted design and development workflows

Qualifications

• Proficiency in modern front-end frameworks: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Next.js
• Experience with design systems. Ideally you've built or overhauled one at scale
• Strong design sensibility: you care about craft, consistency, interaction quality, and taste
• Fluency in AI-assisted workflows: canvas-to-code, code-to-canvas, AI prototyping tools, MCP integrations, and what's emerging in this space
• Experience working with tools like Figma, Storybook, VSCode, Chromatic, and GitHub
• A track record of working across design and engineering: you've done both, and you know how to collaborate across both
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy: you set direction, influence standards, and manage complex projects without a lot of hand-holding
• 8+ years in design engineering, UX engineering, design technology, or a related hybrid role

Bonus points

• Experience designing or building data visualizations
• Background in brand and/or product design
• Experience with accessibility: WCAG 2.2, ARIA patterns, semantic HTML, APCA, accessible data viz
• Experience working in a product analytics or developer-focused product environment