We operate in a space with complex workflows, significant technical constraints, and a high bar for trust and usability. Creating exceptional experiences requires design and engineering to work as one system.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a Director, Staff Design Engineer to bridge product design and front-end engineering, with a particular focus on user experience, design systems, and agentic software design.

You’ll turn design intent into scalable, production-quality patterns and components while helping designers and engineers explore new experiences faster. You’ll work across our design language, UI architecture, interaction design patterns, and capabilities to make it easier for teams to build coherent, high-quality experiences.

This role is hands-on. You’ll design in code, build production React components, and work directly with Product, Design, and Engineering to solve complex user experience problems.

We can only consider candidates for this position who are able to accommodate a hybrid work schedule and are close to our Charlotte, NC office.

Key Responsibilities

Design Systems & UI Engineering

• Build and evolve reusable, accessible, production-quality UI components and patterns.
• Translate design language, interaction patterns, and design tokens into scalable front-end systems.
• Partner with designers and engineers to ensure design intent carries through to production.
• Establish patterns that make high-quality user experiences easier and faster for product teams to build.
• Improve consistency across products while allowing patterns to evolve as user and business needs change.
• Identify gaps between design systems, application architecture, and actual product experiences and help close them.

User Experience Design & Prototyping

• Partner with Product and Design to frame user problems and explore potential solutions.
• Create prototypes at the fidelity needed to answer the question—from Figma concepts to functional React experiences.
• Use working software to explore interaction models, workflows, and emerging product concepts.
• Help teams evaluate ideas earlier by making realistic experiences available for user testing and experimentation.
• Contribute strong interaction design, visual design, and front-end perspectives to product decisions.
• Understand advisor workflows and translate complex financial processes into clear, usable experiences.

Front-End Engineering

• Design and implement complex front-end experiences using modern web technologies.
• Build maintainable React components and application patterns that can be reused across teams.
• Make thoughtful decisions about component APIs, state, composition, accessibility, responsiveness, and performance.
• Contribute to front-end architecture and technical decisions that affect the user experience.
• Maintain a high standard of implementation quality through code review, testing, documentation, and collaboration.

Design & Engineering Enablement

• Improve the tools and workflows connecting design and engineering.
• Help designers work closer to production systems and help engineers better understand design intent.
• Develop shared primitives, examples, reference implementations, and guidance teams can build from rather than starting from scratch.
• Explore emerging tools—including AI-assisted design and development—to improve how teams prototype and deliver experiences.
• Reduce the distance between an idea, a prototype, and production software.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Serve as a bridge between Design, Product, and Engineering.
• Mentor designers and engineers in design systems, interaction patterns, prototyping, and front-end craft.
• Facilitate collaboration around complex UX and technical problems.
• Communicate design and technical tradeoffs clearly to stakeholders.
• Influence the evolution of AssetMark’s design language and front-end practices across teams.

About You

• You think like both a designer and an engineer and are comfortable moving between the two.
• You care deeply about interaction details, visual quality, accessibility, and implementation quality.
• You understand that a design system is more than a component library—it includes patterns, principles, tokens, interaction behaviors, and shared language.
• You prefer working prototypes and real examples over extensive documentation.
• You can move comfortably between Figma and code.
• You enjoy simplifying complex workflows and systems.
• You can distinguish between when consistency matters and when a new problem requires a new pattern.
• You are comfortable working without fully defined requirements and helping teams determine what should be built.
• You favor meaningful user impact over theoretical perfection.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Deep expertise in modern front-end development, particularly React, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS.
• Strong understanding of interaction design and user experience fundamentals.
• Experience building and maintaining component libraries or design systems.
• Strong understanding of design tokens, component APIs, responsive design, and accessibility.
• High visual UI craft and attention to implementation detail.
• Experience with Figma and modern prototyping workflows.
• Ability to prototype rapidly in both design tools and code.
• Understanding of front-end architecture, performance, testing, and maintainability.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with product designers, product managers, and application engineers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted design and development tools and emerging design-to-code workflows.

Qualifications & Experience

• 7+ years of experience across front-end engineering, product design, design engineering, or related disciplines.
• Demonstrated experience shipping high-quality user interfaces in production software.
• Portfolio or body of work demonstrating both UX/design thinking and front-end implementation.
• Experience contributing to or leading a design system or shared UI platform.
• Experience developing complex, workflow-oriented applications.
• Experience collaborating across Product, Design, and Engineering.
• Experience in financial services, wealth management, fintech, or another regulated industry is preferred.

A traditional educational background is not required; equivalent professional experience is valued.

Compensation: The Base Salary range for this position is between $160,000-$180,000.

This information reflects a base salary range that AssetMark reasonably expects to pay for the position based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, education, experience, and actual work location. This position will also be eligible for additional variable incentive compensation and competitive benefits.

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the US to be considered. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position.

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