Senior Design Engineer

Design at Stepstone

Find the right job for everyone. Our mission reflects how design has been part of our DNA for more than a decade. Our product design organisation has evolved through this time and today we are a team of 30+ designers including Design Operations, Design System, Design Foundation and Design Engineer roles. We are also part of a wider design organisation including our dedicated User Research team of +10 people.

As a product design team, we have designers in key senior leadership positions and therefore you will always have support pushing for strategical initiatives across the business.

We are spread across both the B2C and B2B sides of the business, providing an end-to-end experience, for both candidates and recruiters alike.

The Role

We're redefining the job search and recruitment experience, and the design system is critical infrastructure for how we deliver that at quality. This is a senior-level IC role, and we're looking for builders.

Design Engineering is a newly established function within our Design Organisation, and you'll help shape what it becomes. You'll work in our multidisciplinary Design Systems team alongside other design system and design engineering experts, as well as engineers and a PM.

You're a design systems expert with strong UI craft and solid design fundamentals, able to design and build robust, scalable, accessible systems: reusable components, patterns and documentation. You'll drive adoption of the system across the organisation, and you'll be just as comfortable in design tools as in code. That means building the tools, processes and workflows that help our design organisation and product teams design, build and deliver faster and more consistently.

You'll also mature our AI-assisted prototyping infrastructure and our design-to-code workflows. We want someone who brings real expertise and an experimental approach to AI, and who helps the wider team do the same.

Your responsibilities:

• Design and build robust, scalable, accessible components and patterns with clear visual logic, considered interaction states and exceptional craft.
• Evolve the design system (tokens, components and patterns) in close partnership with front-end engineers, knowing when components need to change, consolidate or be retired, and making those changes with precision.
• Create and maintain documentation, and drive adoption across the organisation by supporting teams, consulting on accessibility and continually evolving our libraries and processes to meet their needs.
• Improve the design-to-code workflow and raise the quality bar for shipped UI. Tighten fidelity between Figma and production to reduce handoff gaps and rework, backed by design QA, accessibility and performance standards.
• Build and mature our AI-assisted prototyping infrastructure (repos, hosting, naming and discoverability, access) so teams can create coded, data-connected prototypes and test ideas faster. Explore and apply AI across design system work, and help designers build skills and confidence in AI tooling.

Qualifications

• Design Systems Craft: Proven track record shipping high-quality components and patterns, with exceptional attention to interaction, visual design, motion, accessibility, and documentation. This is a design role first.
• T-Shaped Technical Skill: Broad design literacy plus deep capability in component engineering, tokens/design infrastructure, or prototyping, and comfortable working in code alongside front-end engineers.
• AI-Forward Mindset: Actively applies AI to design system and prototyping work, and helps others do the same.
• Accessibility Advocate: Deep knowledge of accessibility standards and a commitment to an inclusive, usable system.
• Systems Thinker and Collaborator: Balances consistency with flexibility as the system scales, builds strong partnerships across design and engineering, and clearly explains decisions to both audiences.