Lead Design Engineer

At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew.

We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization.

To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success.

Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture.

If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

This is the first design engineer role at Braze. You'd be joining the Beacon team to help close the gap between where the system is today and where it needs to be.

This is a senior individual contributor role operating at the intersection of design and code. You have strong design craft judgment and a clear point of view on what good looks like. You can originate design positions and you can write production code like components, tokens, or accessibility fixes. You'll contribute hands-on while driving adoption, mentoring designers, and raising the bar for system-level design craft, accessibility, and implementation quality across the UX organization.

You'll also help future-proof our design system by thinking about it not only as a resource for human collaborators, but as structured context for automated and AI-assisted workflows. This means designing its architecture, naming conventions, and documentation so that tooling, CLI interfaces, and AI agents can consume it reliably and without ambiguity.

Responsibilities:

• Own the design and technical direction of Beacon in close partnership with Engineering, defining what good looks like across interaction patterns, component behavior, and shared UX foundations
• Write production code: contribute directly to component architecture, token architecture, and the design-to-code pipeline, including Figma variables and sync workflows
• Partner with frontend engineers on CSS architecture, semantic HTML, and WCAG compliance to raise the bar for accessibility and implementation quality across the organization
• Mentor designers in accessibility, responsive systems, and implementation-aware design thinking
• Build automation and tooling that improves system compliance, efficiency, and programmatic access, including architecture and documentation designed to be consumed by AI-assisted workflows
• Drive adoption across product teams through contribution models, governance workflows, and documentation, without relying on formal authority
• Reduce fragmentation, track system health and accessibility metrics, and own versioning and deprecation communication to consuming teams

WHO YOU ARE

• Typically 5+ years in design systems, design engineering, or highly technical product design. Depth and quality of what you've built matters more than tenure
• Strong design craft judgment at the system level. You can define, evaluate, and defend what good looks like across interaction patterns and component behavior
• You write production code. Fluent in React and TypeScript, component architecture, modern CSS, and semantic HTML in a real codebase, not just prototypes
• Fluent in Figma, including variables, design tokens, and token-to-code pipeline workflows
• Experience driving accessibility improvements at scale: audits, remediation, or building accessible primitives from the ground up
• A track record of driving adoption across multiple product teams through influence and trust, not formal authority
• Comfortable in fast-moving environments with high ambiguity

This is not a role for someone who sits between design and engineering as a translator. You have to be able to originate design positions and implement them yourself.

Bonus if you have: 

• Experience with Storybook or equivalent component documentation platforms
• Familiarity with modern frontend frameworks such as React in a component library context
• Built internal developer tooling, automated validation systems, or CI/CD-integrated quality checks
• Contributed to open-source UI systems or frontend and design systems communities
• Integrated design systems with AI-assisted tooling or automated compliance workflows

For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $136,000 and $205,275/year with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $160,000 and $241,500/year (including bonus or commission). Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company.