Senior Design Systems Engineer
ABOUT THE ROLE
We’re hiring a Design Systems Engineer to be one of the few engineers building the components that every Ramp product team uses — the person who makes our design system real in code. You’ll work in close partnership with our design systems lead and designers: they decide what the rules are, and you decide how to enforce them. Sometimes that’s a component that won’t allow a bad pattern. Sometimes it’s a codebase move that makes the right path the easy one. Sometimes it’s automation that catches drift before it spreads.
With AI agents now writing much of the UI, this role is also at the frontier of a changing craft. You’ll help decide what the system has to guarantee when humans and agents are both building on top of it — because agents don’t settle for the happy path, and the system needs to hold up either way.
Having worked as a designer (or deeply alongside one), you understand the design-eng collaboration challenges firsthand. You’re driven to improve it because you’ve lived with the pain points. You excel in UI and accessible design, prefer working directly in-browser, and get excited about emerging CSS properties.
This is an IC role on a small team, which means you’ll have real say in architecture, API design, and the tradeoffs that shape how Ramp builds — foundational, detail-obsessed frontend work with an outsized impact on every screen we ship.
What You’ll Do
- Build and evolve the components and APIs that every product team at Ramp depends on
- Make the enforcement call: when to encode a rule in the component itself, when to leave it to guidance, and when to invest in automation that catches drift
- Partner with our design systems lead and designers to turn UX patterns and principles into working, consistent components
- Shape the system so it holds up when both engineers and AI agents are building on it
- Contribute to internal tooling and infrastructure that keeps velocity high without sacrificing quality
- Champion the user experience and accessibility of our products, and keep the quality bar high
- Help designers and engineers across Ramp ship faster with elegant, consistent component APIs and a focus on developer experience
- Advocate for users by continuously iterating on our core products and experiences
- Participate in day-to-day team rituals like design crit, story creation, and weekly stand-ups
- Help us hire and grow the team to bring more craft and more perspectives to the work
What You Need
- Tech/startup or digital product agency experience, or equivalent
- A strong frontend engineer who could pass any engineering loop at Ramp — real hands-on skill, not just prompting AI to write code
- Experience building design system components and APIs, not only consuming them
- Excellent front-end development skills in semantic HTML, CSS (up to date on latest features) and JavaScript (and frameworks, pref. React)
- Ability to drive implementation end to end, with sound UX and system design sense
- Strong understanding of Product Design software (pref. Figma) and visual/interaction design principles
- Strong organizational skills and a love for documentation
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a willingness to push back with reasons — e.g., when encoding a rule in a component would slow everyone down
- Care for the details: motion, states, accessibility, and the small decisions that make a system feel coherent
Nice to Haves
- Design systems experience from before AI tooling took off
- Ability to articulate complex concepts to technical and non-technical peers
- Solid understanding of accessibility development practices