Senior or Staff Design Engineer, Design Systems

Job description

WHY HARVEY At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come. This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. We have strong product-market fit and world-class investor support. We’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched. Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you. At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started. ROLE OVERVIEW Harvey designs and builds for a legal industry being reshaped by AI, moving with the urgency and ambition the moment demands, not just adapting to change but architecting it. As a Design Systems Designer at Harvey, you will define the foundations that make our product coherent, scalable, and trustworthy as it grows in complexity. The design system is not just a library of components. It is the shared language between design, engineering, and AI that ensures consistency, quality, and confidence across every interaction. This is a design role with unusual technical depth. You lead with design: craft, systems thinking, and a strong point of view on product experience. But you're equally at home in architecture and implementation. You understand how tokens are structured, how components are composed, and how systems are built to scale, and you use that fluency to push the system forward rather than hand decisions over the wall. We're looking for someone who has lived through the evolution of the discipline, someone who understands not just how modern design systems work, but why they're built the way they are, and where the field is heading, especially as AI-native products reshape what a design system needs to be. This role will report to the Design org, and will be based in SF, NYC, or Toronto. WHAT YOU’LL DO 1. Build an AI-native design system that sets the bar for design quality for Design, Engineering, and Product through technical direction and collaboration - Design, prototype, and ship production-ready system components in tight collaboration with frontend and platform engineering, with shared ownership of quality, performance, and maintainability - Define and evolve the core design system foundations (components, patterns, and tokens) that scale across complex, AI-powered experiences - Push both the architecture and the implementation of the system: shape component APIs, token structure, theming, and composition patterns alongside engineering, not downstream of it - Advocate for technical approaches with confidence, especially in new or ambiguous territory where established patterns don't yet exist - Embed accessibility, responsiveness, and performance into the system by default - Establish clear contribution, governance, and deprecation models that balance velocity with system integrity - Raise the bar for system quality across the product through design reviews, critique, and hands-on work - Build alignment across Design, Engineering, and Product through technical direction and collaboration - Anticipate future product and platform needs, evolving the system proactively as Harvey scales 2. Own AI design and implementation workflows for the design team, establishing best practices for prototyping and shipping with AI - Establish in-code prototyping patterns that make it easier to be innovative and consistent as designers increasingly leverage IDEs to experiment and ship. - Define AI-assisted design and implementation workflows, establishing best practices for prototyping and shipping with AI - Document system usage and best practices in a way that is clear, practical, and trusted by product teams WHAT YOU HAVE - 5+ years (Senior) / 8+ years (Staff) of product design experience, with significant ownership of design systems in complex product environments - A design portfolio that demonstrates high design craft in system-level thinking, but a strong point of view on quality, and visual cohesion - Deep design systems expertise, including an understanding of the history and evolution of the discipline. You know why the field moved from style guides to tokens to composable architectures, and you have a point of view on what comes next - Excellent design engineering communication: you articulate system decisions and tradeoffs fluently to designers, engineers, and cross-functional partners - Ability to clearly articulate system decisions and tradeoffs to designers, engineers, and cross-functional partners - Strong knowledge of scalable system architecture and component implementation: component API design, design tokens, theming strategies, and how systems hold up across teams and codebases - Design Engineer experience preferred, but not required in an AI-first world where the boundary between design and engineering is shifting - High ownership: you treat the system as a product, not a ticket queue - Strong opinions, loosely held, being comfortable challenging conventions and evolving best practices as the discipline changes - Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and bringing structure where it doesn't yet exist WHY DESIGN SYSTEMS MATTER AT HARVEY Harvey is an AI-native product. As the system reasons, responds, and adapts in real time, the interface must remain consistent and legible. A strong design system ensures that complexity does not leak into the experience. It enables teams to move faster, reduces cognitive load for users, and builds trust in moments where clarity matters most. COMPENSATION $205,760 - $315,000 USD DEPENDING ON YOUR LOCATION, AN APPLICANT PRIVACY NOTICE MAY APPLY TO YOU. YOU CAN FIND ALL OF OUR APPLICANT PRIVACY NOTICES [HERE https://www.notion.so/harveyai/Harvey-Candidate-Privacy-Policies-319ac3fcdd7a803bb807d5094f249922]. #LI-JC1 Harvey is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing accommodations@harvey.ai