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Staff Software Engineer, Design Systems

San Francisco Bay Area

Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.

The Design Systems team is a cross-functional team that ensures design quality across all facets of UI, content, and graphics. We develop the core primitives and standards that engineers and designers use to build Discord’s products. Designers and engineers on this team collaborate closely to accelerate product feature teams’ ability to ship new features with UI that are accessible, consistent, and high quality. This team also sets the standard for accessibility on Discord, and supports other engineering teams in achieving it. As such, the Design Systems team plays a critical role enabling Discord to achieve its core mission: creating a space for everyone to find belonging.

What You'll Be Doing

  • Leading the team’s technical direction and architecture of the engineering foundations that underpin our frontend primitives.
  • Working closely with our engineers and designers to build and maintain our design system, Mana, (design tokens, components, and other code patterns) and improve it over time.
  • Authoring beautiful, accessible components that work across all our supported platforms (iOS, Android, desktop, and web).
  • Building internal tools like Figma plugins, asset pipelines, codemods, and lint rules to empower all of our engineers and designers to use the design system to the fullest extent.
  • Providing guidance to teams on the best way to use design systems components and tools across their projects through pairing and documentation.
  • Creating interactive prototypes to communicate your work and using user research & data to inform your reasoning
  • Inspiring the entire team and our internal partners by bringing new ideas to the table and implementing them as next-generation product primitives.
  • Mentoring engineers and setting high engineer standards through code and RFC review and championing UI/UX quality at Discord.

What you should have

  • 8+ years of work experience as a software engineer building, shipping, and iterating on product features or internal tools.
  • 4+ years experience working on a design system.
  • Expertise with web (React, TypeScript) and mobile (React Native, Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin) client-focused development. We're a cross-platform team and believe that engineers should be empowered to work across a variety of tech stacks. We'll support you in learning the stacks you don't know!
  • A deep understanding of accessibility and performance, and their application in creating robust user interfaces.
  • Strong, clear written communication skills and a healthy appreciation for good documentation.
  • Strong UI/UX sensibility and passion for great design and user experience. You have an eye for detail and have implemented polished interfaces and animations (bonus if you’ve used libraries like Reanimated).
  • Experience working on cross-functional teams with designers or product managers.
  • Willingness and excitement to learn new technical skills and expand your toolkit.
  • A consistent track record of delivering multi-milestone projects on time and at a high level.
  • Experience safely migrating existing front-end codebases to new technical patterns at scale.


The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $279,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, or benefits.

Why Discord? 

Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We're a multiplatform, multigenerational and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission! Your future is just a click away!

Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. We want you to feel set up for success, so if you are in need of reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.

Please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy for details regarding Discord’s collection and usage of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking HERE.

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