Staff Engineer - Design Systems

What Design Systems does

Own and evolve Telescope, Pleo’s design system (components, patterns, guidelines, and tooling).

• Enable product teams to ship faster with consistent UI, accessibility, and quality.
• Partner with Design and Engineering across the company to drive adoption and improve the contribution experience.
• Steward shared foundations (tokens, components, documentation, and best practices).

What you’ll be doing

As a Staff Engineer in Design Systems, you will be a force multiplier for product delivery and UI quality across Pleo.

• Set technical direction for key parts of Telescope (architecture, component standards, release practices, and quality bars).
• Drive and evolve our contribution model and how teams interact with Design Systems.
• Own and improve how requests flow into the team (triage, prioritisation, and expectations).
• Improve the developer and contributor experience through tooling and automation, including:
  • Design system visual testing and workflows.
  • Supporting internal operational needs where relevant.
  • Improving how we measure and communicate adoption and system health.
  • Evolving our docs publishing workflow.
• Lead rituals that keep the team effective and aligned.
• Represent Design Systems in cross-team initiatives and align stakeholders across Design and Engineering.
• Coach and mentor engineers, and help grow technical leadership in the frontend community.
• Contribute hands-on in code. This role blends strategy and execution. You should expect to be coding a meaningful part of the time.

You’ll bring solid experience with

• Building and maintaining component libraries or platform-like products that serve multiple teams.
• TypeScript and modern frontend engineering (React experience is a plus).
• Designing maintainable systems with clear boundaries, versioning, and backwards compatibility.
• Testing practices and tooling (unit, integration, end-to-end) and a strong quality mindset.
• Accessibility and performance best practices for UI systems.
• Collaboration with designers and product engineers, and navigating tradeoffs across stakeholders.

Your colleagues would say you

• Lead by example and raise the bar with pragmatism and care.
• Communicate clearly, listen well, and bring people along in decisions.
• Enjoy breaking down complex problems, gathering input, and driving to a solution.
• Coach others and create space for people to grow.
• Prefer progress over perfection, while still caring deeply about quality.