Staff Design Engineer

As a Staff Design Engineer at GitHub, you’ll play a key role in shaping the future of GitHub’s product experience and in defining what design engineering leadership looks like across the company. You won’t just prototype ideas: you’ll help drive them into production systems that ship, scale, and delight users. You’ll work at the intersection of design, engineering, and product strategy, and you’ll be accountable for outcomes — from early concepts through shipping production-ready features.

In this role, you’ll lead by example as an individual contributor, mentor design engineers, influence cross-team technical and design decisions, and partner closely with product, platform, and design leadership on long-term strategy. You'll work hands-on with design primitives, open source systems, and emerging front-end technologies. You'll prototype, build, iterate, and refine experiences that millions of developers rely on. You'll bring curiosity, strong opinions on quality, and the range to take work from concept through ship.

Design Engineers at GitHub are expert individual contributors with a lot of autonomy and trust. We're looking for someone who builds as a way of thinking — someone who sketches ideas in code, navigates ambiguity with confidence, and drives clarity across teams. This role is ideal for builders excited to elevate how design engineering shapes GitHub and help define the future of developer experience at scale.

• Front-End Craft & Adaptability: Deliver front-end experiences with a focus on quality and detail, adapting quickly to new technologies and approaches—even when all the answers aren’t clear.
• Exploration & Prototyping: Rapidly explore and prototype interactive concepts, especially around emerging UX patterns and AI-ready design languages, moving fast to test ideas and learn what works.
• Experiment with design primitives and open source systems.
• Systems & Architecture: Support evolving and scaling design systems, contribute to robust information architecture, and help advance open source initiatives.
• Design Systems Integration: Integrate and use design system components to deliver product consistency and alignment with company standards.
• Communication: Collaborate and communicate clearly with cross-disciplinary teams throughout ideation, design, and development for inclusive and well-understood messaging.
• Accessibility & Craft: Deliver accessible, high-quality visual and interaction designs from concept to completion, ensuring assets, flows, and animations support GitHub’s brand and principles.
• Shaping: Defining great products and developer experiences with a point of view, where good defaults and what not to include is as intentional as essential as what makes it into the final solution.
• Brand & Experience: Build and refine interactive experiences that fully reflect GitHub’s brand vision.
• Progress and tempo: it's easy to get caught up in the meta-design details, so our team must be mindful that we keep making decisions and move forward quickly. We prioritize progress over correctness.
• Curiosity: In a fast-paced environment like AI and LLMs, our designers remain curious and comfortable learning about existing and upcoming new capabilities to identify opportunities.
• Design Quality: Bridge the gap and collaborate with product, design, and engineering to build high-quality, scalable, and interactive components.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years experience in front-end engineering or development

  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Art, Computer Science, Human Factors Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, Information Architecture, or related field AND 8+ years experience in front-end engineering or development

  • OR Master's Degree in Industrial Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Art, Computer Science, Human Factors Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, Information Architecture, or related field AND 6+ years experience in front-end engineering or development

  • OR Doctorate in Industrial Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Art, Computer Science, Human Factors Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, Information Architecture, or related field AND 4+ years experience in front-end engineering or development

  • OR equivalent experience. 

• Fluency with modern front-end technologies and design/prototyping tools like Figma; experience working directly in codebases and working with AI-powered design and development tools and workflows.

• Hands-on engineering experience with modern front-end technologies (e.g., React, CSS, HTML, JavaScript/TypeScript) and design systems.

   

Preferred Qualifications:

• Comfort with a hybrid working model, including regular presence in the GitHub San Francisco office to support team collaboration and connection.
• Experience building AI and agentic experiences.
• Experience working with Engineers, Product Managers, and other Designers applying UX principles, and a user-centric approach.
• Experience with WCAG compliance and/or implementing accessibility best practices.
• Experience building products for developer tools.

GitHub values

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

• Model
• Coach
• Care

Leadership principles

• Create clarity
• Generate energy
• Deliver success