Senior Design Engineer, Design System

Why this role matters

At Celonis, design has to scale across a complex, enterprise-grade process intelligence platform, and increasingly, it has to scale to machines as well as people. AI coding agents now generate a growing share of the UI our engineers ship, and our design system is the contract that keeps that output on-brand, accessible, and consistent.

This role sits at the intersection of design, engineering, and product, with a strong emphasis on craft, usability, and scalability. You'll design and build the system itself, owning interaction decisions and front-end architecture, and translating complex process data and AI-driven behaviors into intuitive, high-performance experiences. It's a senior role: you'll often operate with minimal design oversight, set standards, lead initiatives, and mentor others while staying deeply hands-on in both design and code.

About the team

You'll join the team that owns Celonis's design system and the operations behind how design gets done. We sit at the intersection of design and engineering, and we treat the system as a living product with real users, internal designers, product engineers, and the AI agents that now consume it.

What you'll do

• Design and build production components in Angular and TypeScript, our design system is built in Angular and we may adopt React over time, on a foundation of rock-solid HTML and CSS (semantic markup, ARIA, and modern CSS custom properties driving design tokens).
• Own interaction decisions, component design, and front-end architecture end-to-end, independently translating ambiguous requirements into thoughtful, usable UX.
• Translate complex process-intelligence data and AI-driven behaviors into clear, intuitive, high-performance operator experiences.
• Set the technical and craft standard for front-end quality, polish, motion and animation, performance, and accessibility, across the team.
• Drive rapid prototyping to explore novel interaction concepts and turn ambitious design visions into distinctive, testable experiences.
• Collaborate with designers, PMs, and engineers to derive and evolve the design system through a healthy contribution model.
• Make the system agent-ready: maintain tokens-as-code in the W3C DTCG format (Style Dictionary or similar) and structure component metadata, docs, and APIs so AI coding agents can consume them as reliable context.
• Author and maintain Figma Code Connect mappings so Figma components link cleanly to their coded counterparts for engineers and agents alike.
• Build evals as guardrails, visual-regression, accessibility, and token-compliance checks in CI, so generated and contributed UI meets the bar before it ships.
• Use AI tooling daily (Figma Make, v0, Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar), applying senior design and engineering judgment to critique and correct the output.
• Lead system initiatives and mentor designers and engineers contributing to it.

What you'll bring

• Around 5–8 years across design engineering / UX engineering / front-end, including significant hands-on work building a design system or component library in a SaaS or B2B environment.
• Excellent UX instincts with strong attention to interaction detail and usability, you can own design decisions independently, with minimal oversight.
• Strong production front-end skills in Angular and TypeScript with rock-solid HTML and CSS fundamentals; experience with (or genuine openness to) React is a plus.
• Deep understanding of design token architecture (primitive → semantic → component tiers) and modern token pipelines.
• Strong Figma fluency and comfort moving fluidly between design and code.
• Demonstrated accessibility expertise (WCAG 2.2) implemented in code.
• Hands-on fluency with AI design and coding tools, and an opinionated, responsible point of view on using them.
• A strong product mindset and bias toward ownership, plus the communication and leadership of a senior IC.

Bonus points

• Experience with Figma Code Connect in production.
• Experience building or integrating MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers e.g. the Figma Dev Mode MCP server or a custom design-system MCP server.
• Experience building evals for AI-generated UI, or writing specs/prompts for AI generation.
• Background working on complex, data-dense, or real-time interfaces (a strong fit for our process-intelligence product).
• Token-pipeline experience with Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio, or equivalent.

How we work

This is a senior role: you'll own major areas of the system with full autonomy, design and ship with a high bar for craft, set the standards others build to, lead initiatives, and mentor. We pair design craft with engineering depth and high curiosity about AI, building a system that's faster and safer for humans and agents alike.