Front

Senior Design Engineer

Front$135K — $160K *
Technical Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience designing and shipping complex products across web and mobile platforms.
  • Strong portfolio showcasing end-to-end design process and refined UI/UX skills, including prototypes.
  • Experience designing AI-powered experiences with visible work in portfolio.
  • Fluency with AI tools for prototyping, iteration, and production-level changes.
  • Experience conducting independent user research and translating findings into design direction.
  • Proven experience contributing to maintaining design systems with clear documentation.
  • Collaborative mindset with strong communication skills and ability to advocate for design decisions.

Responsibilities

  • Lead design for Front's core inbox and app experience to set quality standards.
  • Conduct user research through interviews and usability sessions, translating insights into design direction.
  • Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data, and Customer Support to define requirements and deliver solutions.
  • Design across web, desktop, and mobile platforms to enhance user experience.
  • Create and communicate design vision through mock-ups, documentation, and prototypes.
  • Advocate for users in discussions around tradeoffs, timelines, and experiences.
  • Contribute to developing and maintaining the design system with effective documentation.
  • Foster a team culture valuing quality work and constructive feedback.

Benefits

  • Competitive salary
  • Equity options backed by leading VCs
  • Private health insurance with employee-friendly options
  • Paid parental leave
  • Flexible time-off policy
  • Hybrid work model with remote flexibility on Mondays and Fridays
  • Mental health support provided
  • Family planning support offered
  • $100 monthly stipend for wellness and fitness activities
  • Additional Wellness Days for time off in certain months
  • Office closure from Christmas to New Year's Day for winter break.
Full Job Description
We9re looking for a Senior Design Engineer to help close the gap between how Front is designed and how Front is built. Front has a mature, complex product surface with more than a decade of UI investment, a rich Figma library, and a large production codebase. This role is for someone who is equally comfortable in Figma and in frontend code, and who wants to turn design systems from static documentation into living, production-quality systems that help product teams move faster.

You9ll own the connective tissue between Design and Engineering: building reusable components, shaping design-system architecture, improving the fidelity between Figma and production, and creating the tooling, patterns, and practices that make high-quality UI easier to ship. You won9t just document the system - you9ll build it, ship it, evolve it, and help teams adopt it.

This is a hands-on senior IC role with high leverage across Product, Design, and Engineering. The right person brings strong frontend engineering judgment, excellent UI craft, deep design-systems experience, and the ability to influence teams without becoming a bottleneck.

What will you be doing?
  • Own and evolve Front9s design system across Figma, Storybook, and production code, helping create a clearer source of truth between design and engineering.
  • Build, refactor, and maintain reusable, accessible, well-documented UI components that product teams can confidently use across Front9s core surfaces.
  • Identify and reduce design/code drift across our existing component libraries, legacy UI patterns, and evolving Figma system.
  • Establish patterns, conventions, and guardrails that improve consistency, accessibility, maintainability, and developer experience.
  • Prototype new interaction patterns and reference implementations in code to help teams align quickly and de-risk complex product decisions.
  • Partner closely with Product Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers to define what 49great49 looks like for complex workflows, edge cases, and enterprise-grade product experiences.
  • Use AI tools thoughtfully to accelerate prototyping, iteration, production changes, and system maintenance while applying strong judgment to the output.


What skills and experience do you need?
  • 6+ years of experience designing and building production frontend experiences, ideally in complex B2B SaaS, enterprise software, developer tools, or similarly deep product domains.
  • Strong frontend engineering skills with modern web technologies and component-based architecture. You do not need to have used Front9s exact stack, but you should be able to ramp quickly in a large, mature codebase.
  • High UI/UX craft and strong product taste. You can evaluate whether an interface is not only visually polished, but also usable, accessible, flexible, and maintainable.
  • Experience building or maintaining component libraries, Storybook documentation, visual regression workflows, design-token pipelines, Figma workflows/plugins, or similar design-engineering infrastructure.
  • Strong accessibility fundamentals, including semantic HTML, ARIA patterns, keyboard interaction models, focus management, and inclusive component states.
  • Strong communication skills. You can explain technical and design-system decisions clearly to both specialists and non-specialists.
  • A portfolio or body of work showing shipped design-engineering impact: production UI, component systems, prototypes, Storybook examples, design-system documentation, or code-backed product work.

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.
  • Experience consolidating fragmented component libraries or aligning Figma libraries with production code.
  • Experience using AI-assisted coding or design tools to accelerate prototyping, refactoring, and product iteration.

What you9ll bring to Front
  • A systems mindset: you see patterns, edge cases, and long-term maintenance costs, not just individual screens.
  • A high craft bar: you care about the last 10% of interaction detail, visual polish, accessibility, and usability.
  • A builder9s bias: you prefer to make ideas real in code, learn from how they behave, and iterate quickly.
  • A collaborative approach: you raise the quality of work around you by making the right path easier for other designers and engineers.
  • Senior-level judgment: you can operate through ambiguity, prioritize high-leverage improvements, and sequence change in a way that teams can actually adopt


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 Year9s Day!

About Front

Front is a software company that provides a shared inbox for teams. It allows teams to manage their email, social media, SMS, and chat in one place. Front was founded in 2013 by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Front has raised over $138 million in funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, DFJ, and Uncork Capital. The company has over 6,000 customers, including Shopify, HubSpot, and Mailchimp.
Learn more about Front
Size
200 employees
Industry
Founded
2013

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