Staff Design Engineer

About your role

We are looking for a Staff Design Engineer to join our Design team. This is a role for someone who has built a design system before, has strong opinions about what makes one great, and wants to do it again at a company where it genuinely matters. You will help define what design engineering looks like at Juniper Square: the standards, the systems, and the strategy for how design and engineering work together as both the team and the product grow.

This role sits in the Design organization. You will report to Design leadership and work across Design, Engineering, and Product. You are not here to execute on someone else's vision. You set the design system strategy, define how AI integrates into the design-to-engineering workflow, and establish what great UI quality looks like at scale.

This is still a deeply hands-on role. You will write code, build components, and prototype to prove out directions. The difference is that your execution sets the example and informs the strategy, rather than being the primary output.

Our product is genuinely complex. We serve investment managers navigating fund accounting, investor portals, and data-heavy reporting workflows. Building a design system that holds up against that complexity and gets adopted by the people who need to use it is the challenge. Making it feel clear, fast, and well-crafted is the job.

AI fluency is a baseline expectation. You have formed opinions through direct experience on how AI changes team-level design-to-engineering workflows, and you are ready to build the systems and strategy around that.

What you’ll do

• Own the design system strategy and roadmap: define what the system needs to become, set priorities, establish governance, and build the contribution model that makes it sustainable as the team and product grow.
• Define the AI enablement strategy for design-to-engineering: determine how AI tools are integrated into the workflow from prototype to production, and build the systems that make the whole team faster and higher-quality.
• Set the technical direction for UI quality across the product: define what good looks like, establish the standards and processes that maintain it, and make the case for that standard across design and engineering leadership.
• Identify systemic quality gaps: look across the product surface and name the patterns no one else is naming, then build the plan to address them.
• Build the infrastructure that lets designers ship in code: not by doing it yourself, but by creating the workflows, tooling, and templates that make it a sustainable part of the design team's practice.
• Partner with Design and Engineering leadership to shape the long-term direction of how the two functions collaborate, where the boundaries are, and how they evolve.

Qualifications

Required

• 10+ years of experience working across design and front-end engineering, with a portfolio that demonstrates both craft and leadership impact.
• Proven experience building and scaling design systems: owning the roadmap, governance, and adoption strategy across a product organization, not just contributing components.
• A strong, defensible point of view on what makes a great design system, backed by experience driving adoption across a product organization: not just building it, but getting designers and engineers to actually use it.
• Deep front-end engineering skills (TypeScript, React, CSS) alongside genuine design taste. Comfortable reading and writing production code, but leading through judgment rather than throughput.
• Experience defining technical strategy for design tooling, developer experience, or design-to-engineering workflows.
• Experience thinking through how AI tools change team-level design and engineering workflows, and building systems or processes around that.
• Strong communication and influence skills: can align design leadership, engineering leadership, and product around a shared technical direction without formal authority.
• Fluency with AI-powered coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, v0.dev, or equivalent) as part of your core workflow.

Preferred

• Experience in a complex B2B or enterprise SaaS environment, ideally in a data-heavy domain.
• Background leading design systems work that scaled across multiple product lines or engineering teams.
• Experience defining or operating AI-powered design-to-engineering workflows at a team or org level.
• Background in Financial Services, Investment Management, or Real Estate (Fintech experience is a plus).
• Familiarity with design tokens, component libraries, and variables in Figma at a systems level.