Staff Design Engineer, Design Systems
About the Team
At Miro, design is intrinsic in everything we do. As a business we are on a mission to redefine how great work is done, and as a design team we aim to make that as easy and delightful as possible.
The design system team owns the leverage point that lets that craft scale: every component, token, and pattern either propagates quality across the product or quietly leaks debt into it. As a part of our Product Design team, you will contribute to our design process, culture, and experience principles and set new standards for design quality.
About the Role
Miro is a canvas — an infinite, multiplayer surface where millions of people think, run workshops, map systems, and build together. Design is what makes that canvas feel considered: fast, fluid, alive, and unmistakably Miro rather than a framework's defaults dressed up.
You own the design system — not by writing the infrastructure that enforces it, but by deciding what "great" looks like and turning that judgment into something the system can pull into the design process.
The design system is AI-native, meaning that agents will generate the first draft of the UI, using the tokens, components, and patterns you've defined. That changes the job. It used to be enough to design a good screen. Now the job is to design the soul and rules a screen gets generated from — to encode taste, not just constraints.
This is a design-first role with a strong foundation in code. You think and communicate in prototypes because they're more honest than a static mock. You reach for a quick build to test whether an idea actually feels right, not to ship production infrastructure. You're not the person building the rendering engine; you're the person with the eye to know when the rendering engine got it wrong.
What you'll do
- You hold and push the quality bar forwards; meaning you don't only define what great design and taste looks like, you encode it.
- Identify the interaction patterns, hierarchy rules, and softer signals (rhythm, restraint, spacing that "feels right") that keep AI-generated UI from feeling machine-made, then work with engineering to get those signals into the guardrails that catch violations before ship.
- Push token thinking into motion, easing, spatial transitions, and multiplayer states like presence and cursors — the aesthetic decisions that make the canvas feel alive.
- Partner closely with engineering, making sure performance constraints don't flatten the product into something generic.
- Build the patterns, guidelines, and examples that make every designer and AI-assisted contributor faster and more confident. Write things down — foundation-level thinking compounds.
What you'll need
- 10+ years of product design experience, ideally in B2B SaaS or AI-focused roles.
- At least 2-3 years operating at a Staff / Principal level, with proven ownership of complex initiatives.
- Comfort in code sufficient to prototype and validate design ideas, without being primarily defined by engineering depth — this is a design-first role with a strong foundation in code.
- The ability to see the difference between fine and right, and to say why out loud: taste here is judgment you can articulate, turn into a rule, and hand to someone else — the kind that notices the 1px that's off, the easing a beat too slow, the contrast that technically passes and visually fails.
- An end-to-end understanding of the product — where a pattern breaks down in a real user flow, or where a component that looks fine in isolation causes friction in context.
- A track record of influence beyond your own output: setting a quality bar explicit enough that others can apply it, and connecting fragmented, team-by-team work into something coherent.
- Craft signals including visual craft and taste, pattern recognition at scale, motion and timing as a design decision, multiplayer interaction grammar (presence, cursors, conflict, co-authorship), and real fluency with AI tools and AI-driven product moments — enough to prototype your own ideas without needing an engineer to stand up a first draft.
- Systems and governance thinking: the ability to articulate the contribution rules that keep a system coherent as it scales, even if someone else writes the enforcement code.
What's in it for you
We want you to feel supported, connected, and ready to grow. Our global benefits package generally includes equity, a wellbeing benefit, a WFH equipment allowance, and an annual Learning & Development stipend. Join a diverse team where you can do your best work. Full benefits may differ per location. If you would like to learn more about location-specific benefits, please refer to our Global Miro benefits board.
About Miro
Miro is a visual workspace for innovation that enables distributed teams of any size to build the next big thing. The platform's infinite canvas enables teams to lead engaging workshops and meetings, design products, brainstorm ideas, and more. Miro, co-headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam, serves more than 100M users and 250,000 companies collaborate in the Innovation Workspace. Miro was founded in 2011 and currently has more than 1,600 employees in 13 hubs around the world.
We are a team of dreamers. We look for individuals who dream big, work hard, and above all stay humble. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do and through our work together we hope to create a supportive, welcoming, and innovative environment. We strive to play as a team to win the world and create a better version of ourselves every day. If this sounds like something that excites you, we want to hear from you!
Check out more about life at Miro:
At Miro, we strive to create and foster an environment of belonging and collaboration across cultural differences. Miro’s mission — Empower teams to create the next big thing — is how we think about our product, people, and culture. We believe that creating big things requires diverse and inclusive teams. Diversity invites all talent with different demography, identities and styles to step in, and inclusion invites them to step closer together. Every day, we are working to build a more diverse Miro, cultivate a sense of belonging for future and current Mironeers around the world, and foster an environment where everyone can collaborate and embrace differences.
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