Design Engineer, Design Systems

We're looking for a Design Engineer who thrives at the intersection of design, front-end engineering AI, and rapid experimentation. You will play a critical role in supporting our Design System (Dialtone). You'll help define how Dialpad explores and prototypes the future of AI-powered communications, designing, building, and iterating on tools and experiences that make our research and product vision tangible. This role sits within the Design organization and partners closely with AI, Research, and Product teams.

You'll design and develop experimental interfaces, internal tools, and proof-of-concept experiences that help teams test hypotheses, evaluate AI interactions, and uncover new product opportunities. This is a individual contributor role, ideal for someone with strong design sensibilities and hands‑on technical fluency, someone who can move seamlessly between Figma, the browser, and AI tooling. You'll prototype production‑quality prototypes with real interactivity, data, and states;

using modern front‑end frameworks and our design system Dialtone; integrate real AI systems into user flows; and build scalable frameworks that accelerate design solutions with technical exploration across teams. This position reports to our Design Engineering Manager.

• You'll play a key role in the front-end design strategy of our Design System - style, components, and patterns by bringing your experience in front-end design and engineering. Your front-end engineering experience may be characterized as "front of the front-end."
• Advocate for Design. Though Dialtone serves both designers and engineers, it all starts with the end user's experience. You'll focus on being the bridge between design and engineering. You'll assist the design system team in maturing to take on large, high‑visibility initiatives, as well as how other designers and engineers contribute.
• Contribute and execute upon a growing design‑focused prototyping practice that explores feasibility, evaluates emerging AI capabilities, and AI design patterns. You will rapidly build functional prototypes that inform product direction.
• Design and build tooling that supports product designers, researchers, and engineers—such as internal utilities, plugins, and scripts that accelerate iteration and experimentation.
• Prototype and validate new interaction models for AI‑powered workflows, experience integrating AI into prototypes, and experimenting with AI‑driven UI patterns.
• Ensure quality and performance in everything you build with rigor, optimizing for accessibility, maintainability, and performance as first‑class concerns in the design process.
• Act as a guardian of consistency, championing reusable components, ensuring designers and developers adhere to a unified system, and evolving Dialtone, our design system.
• Navigate defined problems with autonomy, helping cross‑functional teams clarify ideas and move toward impactful solutions quickly and iteratively.
• Invest in the growth of the Design organization by sharing best practices, mentoring peers in design‑engineering methods, and building community around creative prototyping. An online portfolio demonstrating design‑focused technical expertise across multiple projects, showcasing thoughtful, high‑quality work that drives innovation. 3‑5 years of experience demonstrating exceptional design engineering fluency across modern product environments, including 1‑2+ years contributing to design systems.
• Proficiency and design‑focused passion in the front‑end stack like Vue/React/Angular/etc, HTML, CSS, Design Tokens, and JavaScript/Typescript.
• Track record of designing, documenting, and evolving styles, Design Tokens, component libraries, and UI patterns that scale product development.
• Interest or experience in the design and build of tooling, plugins, or internal utilities that streamline workflows between design and engineering teams.
• Experience building AI/ML‑driven features, prototypes, experimental systems, or research tools, ideally leveraging frameworks like Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar.
• Demonstrated skill in optimizing and refactoring existing UIs for performance, accessibility, and maintainability.
• P…