Staff Design Engineer

About GitHub: GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development — powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.

Locations: In this role you can work from San Francisco, California United States

Overview:

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. You won’t just prototype ideas: you’ll help drive them into production systems that ship, scale, and delight users. You’ll work at the intersection of design, engineering, and product strategy, and you’ll be accountable for outcomes — from early concepts through shipping production-ready features.

In this role, you’ll lead by example as an individual contributor, mentor design engineers, influence cross-team technical and design decisions, and partner closely with product, platform, and design leadership on long-term strategy. You'll work hands-on with design primitives, open source systems, and emerging front-end technologies. You'll prototype, build, iterate, and refine experiences that millions of developers rely on. You'll bring curiosity, strong opinions on quality, and the range to take work from concept through ship.

Design Engineers at GitHub are expert individual contributors with a lot of autonomy and trust. We're looking for someone who builds as a way of thinking — someone who sketches ideas in code, navigates ambiguity with confidence, and drives clarity across teams. This role is ideal for builders excited to elevate how design engineering shapes GitHub and help define the future of developer experience at scale.

Responsibilities:

Front-End Craft & Adaptability: 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.

Exploration & Prototyping: 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.

Systems & Architecture: Support evolving and scaling design systems, contribute to robust information architecture, and help advance open source initiatives.

Design Systems Integration: Integrate and use design system components to deliver product consistency and alignment with company standards.

Communication: 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:

Required 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) and design systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

Comfort with a hybrid working model, including regular presence in the GitHub San Francisco office to support team collaboration and connection.

Experience building AI and agentic experiences.

Experience working with Engineers, Product Managers, and other Designers applying UX principles, and a user-centric approach.

Experience with WCAG compliance and/or implementing accessibility best practices.

Experience building products for developer tools.

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. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

GitHub Leadership Principles:

GitHub values

Customer-obsessed

Ship to learn

Growth mindset

Own the outcome

Better together

Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

Model

Coach

Care

Leadership principles

Create clarity

Generate energy

Deliver success

Who We Are: GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.

Join us, and let’s change the world, together.