Senior Design Engineer
Front · San Francisco
Front is the customer operations platform built for B2B complexity, keeping every team, tool, and customer conversation in sync so companies can scale without losing connection. Others handle simple interactions. Front handles the coordination and context behind complex B2B customer relationships. Over 9,000 companies, including Uber Freight, Navan, and Stripe, rely on Front because it's the only one that can run the operational layer that makes customer-facing work actually succeed.
Backed by Sequoia Capital and Salesforce Ventures, Front has raised $204M from leading venture capital firms and independent investors including top executives at Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, Zoom, and PagerDuty. Front has received numerous accolades, including a Certified Great Place to Work in 2026, Top Places to Work by USA Today 2025, Y Combinator's list of Top Companies in 2023, #4 on Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ ,Inc. Magazine's 2022 Best Workplaces list, and Forbes Best Startup Employers 2022 List.
AI is transforming customer service at a pace the industry hasn’t seen before. Front is at the leading edge of that shift, with more than 9,000 companies worldwide, including CultureAmp, Hootsuite, and Y Combinator, already running their support operations on it.
Your role
As Front’s first Design Engineer, you’ll be a hands-on senior IC with high leverage across Product, Design, and Engineering. You’ll combine strong frontend engineering judgment, excellent UI craft, and deep design-systems expertise to personally design, build, and ship improvements across our mature product and codebase.
Your role will center on three areas:
1. Optimize our design system for humans and agents
Lead the design system’s future architecture across design, documentation, and production code by defining its source-of-truth model, contribution workflows, and the tools that best support them (current tools include Figma and Storybook).
Build, refactor, and maintain a living system of reusable, accessible, well-documented components and guidance that both people and AI agents can reliably discover, use, and contribute to.
Build automations and guardrails that keep design, documentation, and code aligned, surface drift, and reduce manual maintenance.
Use AI tools thoughtfully to accelerate implementation, migration, and system maintenance while applying strong judgment to the output.
2. Raise Front’s product UI bar
Work hands-on across design and frontend code to improve interaction patterns, micro-animations, component states, accessibility, consistency, polish, and delightful finishing details across the product.
Personally design and implement reusable components and reference patterns that make high-quality UI easier to ship.
Partner cross-functionally with Product and Design to align on the best UI solutions that serve user needs.
3. Enable and educate designers and engineers
Establish clear conventions, contribution paths, and practical guidance that build shared fluency in design systems and UI implementation.
Teach and support teams through documentation, pairing, reviews, workshops, and shared best practices so designers and engineers can contribute with greater autonomy and confidence.
Make the right path easier through better defaults, tooling, and guardrails rather than becoming a bottleneck or relying on centralized approval.
What skills & experience do you need?
6+ years of experience designing and building production frontend experiences, ideally in B2B SaaS, enterprise software, developer tools, or similarly mature product environments.
Strong frontend engineering skills with modern web technologies and component-based architecture. You do not need to have used Front’s exact stack, but you should be able to ramp quickly in a large, mature codebase.
High UI craft and strong product taste. You can evaluate whether an interface is visually polished, consistent, accessible, responsive, and maintainable.
Deep experience architecting, building, or maintaining design systems across design and code (components, tokens, documentation, governance, accessibility, contribution models), ideally with hands-on experience applying these systems to AI agents and agent-assisted workflows.
Experience choosing and implementing design-engineering tooling and automation—for example, visual regression, design-token pipelines, component documentation, code-to-design connections, linting, or CI checks.
Strong accessibility fundamentals, including semantic HTML, ARIA patterns, keyboard interaction models, focus management, and inclusive component states.
Strong communication and teaching skills. You can explain technical and design-system decisions clearly, help others build shared fluency, and influence adoption through practical guidance.
A portfolio or body of work showing shipped design-engineering impact: production UI, component systems, interaction details, prototypes, documentation, automation, or code-backed product work.
Experience using AI-assisted coding or design tools to accelerate prototyping, refactoring, and product iteration.
Bonus points
Experience working on products with a large existing frontend surface area, multiple product teams, and a mature or evolving design system.
Experience in customer support, customer operations, collaboration software, internal tools, developer tools, or other workflow-heavy SaaS products.
What you’ll bring to Front
Senior-level judgment: you can operate through ambiguity, prioritize high-leverage improvements, and sequence change in a way that teams can actually adopt.
A builder’s bias: you prefer to make ideas real in code, learn from how they behave, and iterate quickly.
A high craft bar: you care about the last 10% of interaction detail, visual polish, accessibility, and usability.
A systems mindset: you see patterns, edge cases, and long-term maintenance costs, not just individual screens.
A collaborative approach: you raise the quality of work around you by making the right path easier for other designers and engineers
Front operates on a hybrid model — we come together in the office each Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to collaborate and stay connected.
What we offer
Competitive salary
Equity (we are post-series D & backed by some of the best VCs in the US)
Private health insurance, including plan options at no cost to employees
Paid parental leave
Flexible time off policy
Flexibility to work from home Monday and Friday, unless posted as a fully remote role
Mental health support with Workplace Options
Family planning support with Maven
$100 per month Lifestyle Stipend to spend on fitness, health and wellness, and other activities
Wellness Days - Fronteers get an additional day off on months with no holidays
Winter Break - Our offices are closed from Christmas to New Year's Day!
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