Principal Software Engineer, Platform

Description

The company builds search technology that lets people find the answers they need in real time, across all their data, at scale.

This role leads the Global UX engineering team, which owns the company's design system and React component library, along with the shared patterns, tokens, and tooling that keep its products consistent, accessible, and high quality.

The design system sits beneath the UI of every major product. As tech lead, you will write and review code, make the difficult architecture calls, and be the person engineers and designers turn to when a component API, theming approach, or migration path needs solving. The company is a distributed team.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the design system, covering component architecture, API design, theming, accessibility, and long-term maintainability across the many product teams that use it.
• Make the hardest calls on composable component patterns, breaking changes and migration strategy, versioning, token architecture, and the trade-off between flexibility and consistency.
• Lead the Global UX engineering team as tech lead: set standards, review designs and code, unblock engineers on hard problems, and keep their work aligned with one long-term architecture.
• Work with design leadership to turn design language, visual direction, and interaction patterns into reusable, well-documented component APIs.
• Drive adoption across the company by working with consuming teams, understanding their constraints, and improving APIs and docs so the system is easy to adopt rather than forced.
• Raise the standard for accessibility, performance, and cross-browser correctness in shared UI building blocks.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design critique, and pairing, and help grow the next generation of senior and staff engineers.
• Represent the Global UX team in planning with product, design, and engineering leadership, and make the case for investment in design system health and developer experience.
• Use profiling, telemetry, and feedback from consuming teams to find where the system creates friction, and lead the work to remove it.
• Explore how AI can improve design-to-code work, such as generating components from design specs, automating accessibility checks, or assisting migrations, while keeping shipped components correct and high quality.

Requirements

• Deep hands-on experience building and running React and TypeScript component libraries or design systems in production, with many internal or external consumers.
• A proven record of technical leadership: setting architecture, raising quality across a team, and making decisions that others follow without formal authority.
• Experience designing composable, flexible component APIs, such as compound components, render props, headless components, and theming or token systems.
• Strong grasp of accessibility (WCAG, semantic HTML, keyboard and screen reader behavior) and a record of making that rigor a team default.
• Experience running a widely used library through releases, breaking changes, deprecation, migration paths, and documentation that keeps adoption smooth.
• Ability to work directly with designers and design leaders, turning visual and interaction intent into technical constraints and component contracts.
• Good judgment on when to build reusable abstractions versus one-off solutions, and the communication skill to explain those trade-offs to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• A history of mentoring engineers and raising a team's technical level through code review, design docs, and hands-on leadership.
• Experience working openly in a distributed team, with clear written communication, async-first collaboration, and open source or open development practices.
• Curiosity about applying AI to design system workflows, along with the judgment to keep a high bar for correctness and quality in what ships.

Conditions

Pay is base salary only. The role has no variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range is €67.000 - €106.000 EUR. Ranges are set using external market benchmarks, internal pay equity, and the responsibilities and complexity of each role.

The final offer within that range depends on relevant experience, skills and expertise, fit with the role requirements, and the scope and complexity of the position.

Export rules apply: if you are located in or are a national of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (Crimea, the DNR, LNR, Kherson, or Zaporizhzhia), an export license may be required as a condition of employment. National origin and nationality do not affect eligibility.

The company welcomes people with disabilities and aims for an accessible, inclusive hiring process.

Benefits

• Pay based on the work you do here rather than your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles, so you can shape your own calendar.
• A generous number of vacation days each year.
• A match of up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and volunteer service.
• Up to 40 hours each year for volunteer projects you care about.
• At least 16 weeks of parental leave.
• Benefits kept at parity across regions, though rules differ from place to place.