Staff Product Design Engineer

A Staff Product Design Engineer at Pie serves as the technical owner and architect of Pie’s Design System, Amber, ensuring scalable, performant, and intelligent user interfaces across our platform. This role sits at the intersection of Design and Engineering, combining front-end architecture, design systems development, and emerging AI-assisted workflows.

This individual will spend approximately 60–70% of their time hands-on building and evolving Pie’s Design System, Amber, with the remainder focused on system governance, documentation, tooling, and enabling teams through automation and AI-powered development practices. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in modern front-end engineering, design systems implementation, and experience integrating developer tooling with AI platforms such as Cursor, Claude Code, or similar.

How You’ll Do It

Design System Architecture and Engineering:

Own and evolve the technical architecture of Pie’s Amber Design System, including component libraries, tokens, theming, accessibility standards, and front-end patterns.Build scalable, production-ready UI components that enable consistent experiences across internal and customer-facing applications.Establish engineering standards and contribution models that allow product teams to safely adopt and extend Amber.Partner closely with Product Design to translate design intent into performant, reusable code.Ensure system scalability through strong versioning, dependency management, and backward-compatibility strategies.

Development & Integration:

• Develop and maintain Amber’s component library using modern front-end frameworks and tooling.
• Integrate design tokens and system primitives across applications to reduce duplication and technical debt.
• Collaborate with platform and application engineering teams to embed Amber deeply into the SDLC.
• Improve developer experience through tooling, automation, and improved implementation workflows.
• Optimize performance, accessibility, and responsiveness across all system components.

AI-Enabled Development & Automation:

• Lead integration of Amber with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, and emerging AI coding tools).
• Define patterns that allow AI agents and developers to generate UI consistently using Amber standards.
• Create structured documentation and machine-readable patterns that improve AI code generation accuracy.
• Explore and implement AI-driven approaches to component generation, testing, and documentation maintenance.
• Partner with engineering leadership to establish safe and scalable AI development practices.

Document & Enablement:

Own Amber documentation strategy, ensuring clarity for designers, engineers, and AI tooling alike.Build developer onboarding materials, usage guidelines, and implementation examples.Establish governance models for contributions, reviews, and system evolution.Drive adoption through workshops, office hours, and cross-functional collaboration.\

Stakeholder Collaboration:

• Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to align system investments with business priorities.
• Act as a technical thought partner helping teams balance speed, quality, and long-term scalability.
• Advocate for system-level thinking that improves consistency and reduces rework across teams.

Technical Thought Leadership:

• Anticipate industry shifts in front-end architecture, design systems, and AI-assisted development.
• Introduce modern patterns that improve velocity while maintaining strong engineering rigor.
• Champion experimentation and continuous improvement across tooling, workflows, and developer experience.

The Right Stuff

• High school diploma/GED required.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Design Engineering, or related field preferred.
• 8+ years of experience building front-end applications or design systems in modern web environments.
• Proven experience owning or significantly contributing to a production design system.
• Deep expertise in modern JavaScript frameworks (React preferred) and component-driven architecture.
• Strong understanding of design tokens, theming, accessibility (WCAG), and responsive design principles.
• Experience working within Agile software development environments.
• Demonstrated experience collaborating closely with Product Designers and translating design artifacts into scalable implementations.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar platforms.
• Strong documentation and communication skills enabling adoption across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority.
• Experience with Figma, Storybook (or similar), Git workflows, and modern CI/CD practices.
• Exceptional organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple concurrent initiatives.
  Ability to travel up to 15% may be required.

The use of AI in Application Review: To support a fair, efficient, and consistent hiring process, we use AI-powered tools to assist in the initial screening of applications. These tools help us identify qualifications and prior work experiences that align with the requirements of the role. We may also use AI assistant video tools during interviews to support note-taking and candidate evaluation. All AI-powered outputs are still subject to human oversight and decision-making at multiple stages of the process. By submitting your application, you acknowledge and consent to Pie utilizing these AI technologies to assist in our evaluation process.