Staff Design Engineer

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Support evolving and scaling design systems, contribute to robust information architecture, and help advance open source initiatives.
• Integrate and use design system components to deliver product consistency and alignment with company standards.
• 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.

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).

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $200,500.00 - USD $372,300.00 /Yr. These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.