Senior Design Engineer - GM Design System
General Motors · Austin, Texas, United States of America ·
- Seniority
- Senior
- Category
- Engineering design
- Experience
- 5+ years
General Motors · Austin, Texas, United States of America ·
Job Description
We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to help evolve and scale our enterprise design system for the web. In this role, you'll collaborate with designers, engineers, and platform teams to build accessible, performant, and reusable components that power consistent experiences across multiple products and platforms. You'll also contribute to the processes, tools, and standards that enable design excellence at scale, including establishing the patterns and infrastructure needed to support AI-assisted design and development workflows.
Develop and maintain a scalable design system authored in Stencil and distributed as framework-agnostic Web Components.
Extend the system to React and Angular consumers through framework wrappers and integration support.
Write semantic, accessible HTML aligned with WCAG and WAI-ARIA best practices, including keyboard navigation, focus management, and screen reader support. Ensure consistent behavior across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies.
Build modular, maintainable CSS for large-scale applications. Build flexible, reusable components with a focus on performance, accessibility, and self-documentation.
Translate Figma designs into production-ready code, collaborating closely with designers.
Contribute to design system documentation and to the coding standards and best practices that keep it consistent over time.
Work with engineering teams to integrate components into CI/CD pipelines and support robust testing (unit, visual regression, accessibility).
Explore and integrate AI capabilities into design system workflows, streamlining component generation, design token mapping, and automated documentation.
Make the design system consumable by AI coding tools and agents as easily as by people, publishing components, tokens, and usage guidelines in machine-readable formats with Storybook as the foundation.
A bachelor's degree in a technical or design related field, or work experience commensurate with education.
5+ years of experience working as a professional Design Engineer or Design Technologist.
Experience building or contributing to design systems or UI libraries. Strong experience with modern HTML, modern CSS architecture, vanilla JavaScript, and TypeScript (independent of framework abstractions).
Solid understanding of front-end architecture and strategies for scaling CSS in enterprise environments.
Deep knowledge of semantic HTML, WCAG, and ARIA accessibility standards.
Experience with progressive enhancement and performance optimization.
Experience with design tokens, Style Dictionary, or similar tools.
Hands-on experience or active experimentation with AI-enabled design systems, LLM context generation (e.g., custom instructions, rules, or system prompts for code assistants), or AI-driven UI workflows.
Experience building Web Components
Experience with React, Angular, or other modern JavaScript frameworks.
Experience building with Stencil.
Knowledge of testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Playwright) and visual regression tools.
Curiosity for emerging front-end techniques and a passion for continuous learning.
Background in web design, design tooling, or collaborating heavily with design teams.
About GM
Our vision is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion and we embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all.
Why Join Us
We believe we all must make a choice every day – individually and collectively – to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.
Benefits Overview
From day one, we're looking out for your well-being–at work and at home–so you can focus on realizing your ambitions. Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.
Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)
General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of unlawful discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that providing an inclusive workplace creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers.
All employment decisions are made on a non-discriminatory basis without regard to sex, race, color, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, disability, pregnancy or maternity status, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran or protected veteran, or any other similarly protected status in accordance with federal, state and local laws.
We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.
Accommodations
General Motors offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, email us or call us at 1-800-865-7580. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.