Senior Software Engineer, Design Systems

About the Design Systems Team

The Design Systems team owns Thumbprint, Thumbtack's design system used across web, iOS, and Android, plus the engineering tooling that connects design intent to shipped product code. We're small and senior — a design manager and two product designers in the design org, plus two engineers in Productivity Engineering. This role covers web and AI-assisted workflows; the partner engineer covers cross-platform components and design tokens. We partner with Developer Experience on AI tooling and Frontend Infrastructure on our web stack. You can read more about our engineering culture on the Thumbtack Engineering Blog.

The challenge

You'll build the AI-assisted pipeline that moves product work from design to shipped code at Thumbtack: a bidirectional bridge between Figma and Thumbprint's React components, agentic workflows that span low-fidelity exploration through production code, and a prototyping platform where designers, PMs, and engineers iterate together. The pipeline is greenfield, and the design-to-code system you build is the team's invention to make. Developer Experience owns the agent and tooling foundation; Frontend Infrastructure owns the web stack — you'll work with both as you make the design-to-code workflow first-class in each.

What you’ll do

• Design and implement AI-assisted workflows — using tools like Claude Code and Figma MCP — that move work between Figma, prototypes, and our production frontend codebase.
• Work as the engineering counterpart to Product Design — pairing on patterns, components, and workflows that make their work compose into shipped product.
• Evolve Thumbprint, our design system, so it composes cleanly with agentic tooling: machine-readable documentation, MCP-friendly component metadata, and tight integration with the prototyping platform.
• Partner with Developer Experience on the AI agent and tooling foundation, and with Frontend Infrastructure on our web stack, so this work builds on top of theirs rather than duplicating it.
• Engage the engineers and designers who use what you build: run office hours, prioritize their feedback, and ship the highest-impact improvements to how product teams move from idea to production.
• Prototype and evaluate emerging AI development tooling, and bring informed recommendations on what to adopt and scale at Thumbtack.

In order to be successful, you must bring

• Demonstrated experience as a frontend engineer building production product surfaces, with the systems-thinking instincts to reason about tooling, workflows, and platforms as well as features.
• Deep hands-on fluency with the modern web stack: TypeScript, React, and the build, test, and deploy tools that surround them.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, and considered opinions about their limits, where they help, and how to scale them beyond personal use.
• Design system experience is welcome but not required; front-end engineering and AI tooling fluency are the load-bearing skills.
• A track record of building tools and infrastructure that other engineers or non-engineers actually adopted, with judgment about onboarding, documentation, and the feedback loops that make adoption stick.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration instincts, comfortable working closely with designers, PMs, and partner engineering teams as your primary users.
• 6+ years of industry experience in software engineering.

Expected salary ranges

• For candidates living in San Francisco / Bay Area, San Jose, New York City, or Seattle metros, the expected salary range for the role is currently $210,800.00 - $272,800.00.
• For candidates living in Austin, TX or Washington DC metros or in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, or Washington states, the expected salary range for the role is currently $189,600.00 - $245,300.00.
• For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected salary range for this role is currently $179,400.00 - $232,100.00.