Design Systems Engineer (6-Month Contract)
Remote
RemoteContractMedium
ContractMedium
Job Summary
Conduct forensic audits of the existing Angular codebase to catalog component duplication, API patterns, and accessibility failures. Build a comprehensive component audit document and Storybook coverage for primitives including buttons, inputs, and modals using Storybook 8+ and Chromatic. Produce a consolidation proposal recommending canonical components for the design team's Figma library rebuild. Collaborate daily with the tech lead and design partners to remediate accessibility issues and upgrade inherited Storybook configurations. Perform component archaeology to reason about semantics and behavior from code alone.
Required Qualifications
- Strong current Angular experience (Angular 16+, with standalone components, signals, and the modern control flow syntax)
- deep familiarity with Storybook's Angular framework (Storybook 8+, CSF3) and Chromatic
- ability to talk fluently about the tradeoffs of different story-authoring patterns, controls, and test integrations within the Angular Storybook ecosystem
- Substantive prior experience on a design system or internal platform/tooling team — you've contributed to or owned one, not just consumed one
- Strong CSS and front-end fundamentals
- real depth in accessibility (WCAG, ARIA patterns, focus management, screen reader behavior), theming, responsive design, typographic systems, and motion
- Taste and product sense in component API design
- ability to walk through a component you're proud of and explain the decisions behind its API — prop naming, variant structure, what you chose not to expose
- Working comfort with AI-assisted engineering workflows (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar)
- ability to treat AI as a power tool with known failure modes, not a magic wand
- clear-eyed view that the tooling is meaningfully less mature for Angular than for React
- Comfort reading unfamiliar codebases and reasoning about component semantics from code alone
Desired Qualifications
- Experience working closely with a design team — pairing with designers, co-owning component decisions, translating design intent into component APIs
- Experience with consolidation or migration work, taking a sprawling, inconsistent codebase and bringing it toward a canonical state
- Experience inheriting and upgrading an existing Storybook setup — auditing configuration, modernizing addons, untangling story conventions that have drifted
- Familiarity with headless or accessibility-primitive libraries in the Angular ecosystem (Angular CDK, Spartan/ng, ng-primitives, or wrapping web-component libraries like Shoelace)
- an articulate view on when to wrap them versus build primitives from scratch
- Open source contributions to design system or developer tooling projects
- experience writing public-facing component documentation that designers and PMs (not just engineers) actually use
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