Design Technologist

Airtable Airtable · Enterprise · San Francisco, CA · Design

This role focuses on evolving Airtable's design system and exploring AI's impact on UI development. The Design Technologist will build and ship components, develop AI tooling for UI coding (e.g., Claude skills, Cursor rules), and partner with cross-functional teams to improve user experience. The role requires a strong blend of design and engineering skills, with a focus on AI-assisted development workflows.

What you'd actually do

  1. Collaborate on the existing system. Assess its state, establish direction with other contributors, and close the gap between design specs and implementation.
  2. Build and ship components and tokens yourself, while evolving contribution standards with the broader community of designers and engineers who maintain the system alongside you.
  3. Develop and evangelize a point of view on AI-assisted UI development. Experiment with tooling, workflows, and system structures that make AI a reliable collaborator for anyone writing UI code: engineers, designers, and PMs.
  4. Build and maintain the AI tooling layer for UI: Claude skills, Cursor rules, LLM-consumable documentation, or whatever meaningfully improves the quality and velocity of coding UI.
  5. Partner with designers, engineers, and accessibility to Improve the quality of user experience created by everyone working with the system—through advocacy, better documentation, clearer patterns, and tooling that makes the right thing the easy thing.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years at the intersection of design and engineering
  • Deep fluency in design tokens, component architecture, theming, and accessibility standards (WCAG)
  • Ability to influence through craft, clarity, and relationships

Nice to have

  • Experience inheriting and evolving systems
  • Actively curious about AI-assisted development
  • Experimented with LLM-driven tooling, Claude skills, codegen, or similar workflows
  • Strong instincts on sequencing and prioritization

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-assisted UI development
  • AI tooling layer for UI
  • LLM-consumable documentation
  • Claude skills
  • Cursor rules

Other signals

  • AI-assisted UI development
  • AI tooling layer for UI
  • LLM-consumable documentation
  • Claude skills
  • Cursor rules