Description
Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale , unleashing the potential of businesses and people.
In this role, you will provide technical leadership for the Global UX engineering team, the group responsible for Elastic UI (EUI) - Elastic's design system and React component library - and the shared patterns, tokens, and tooling that give Elastic products a consistent, accessible, and high-quality experience.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership for Elastic UI (EUI), setting direction for component architecture, API design, theming, accessibility, and long-term maintainability across a design system consumed by many product teams.
- Own the hardest technical decisions in the system: composable component patterns, breaking-change and migration strategy, versioning, token architecture, and the tradeoffs between flexibility and consistency.
- Act as tech lead for the Global UX engineering team - setting technical standards, reviewing designs, unblocking engineers on difficult problems, and ensuring the team's work ladders up to a coherent long-term architecture.
- Partner closely with design leadership to translate design language, visual direction, and interaction patterns into robust, reusable, well-documented component APIs.
- Drive adoption of the design system across Elastic by working directly with consuming teams, understanding their constraints, and evolving EUI's APIs and documentation so adoption is easy rather than forced.
- Raise the bar on accessibility, performance, and cross-browser correctness for shared UI building blocks used throughout Elastic's products.
- Mentor and grow engineers on the team through code review, design critique, and pairing, and help develop the next generation of senior and staff-level engineers.
- Represent the Global UX team in cross-functional 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 identify where the design system is creating friction, and lead the initiatives that fix it.
- Explore how AI can improve the design-to-code workflow - for example, component generation from design specs, automated accessibility checks, or AI-assisted migration tooling - while holding the team accountable for the quality and correctness of shipped components.
Requirements
- Deep, hands-on expertise building and operating React and TypeScript component libraries or design systems in production, at a scale with many internal or external consumers.
- A strong track record of technical leadership - setting architecture, raising quality standards across a team, and making decisions that other engineers align behind without needing formal authority.
- Experience designing composable, flexible component APIs, including patterns like compound components, render props, headless components, and theming/token systems.
- Strong instincts for accessibility (WCAG, semantic HTML, keyboard and screen-reader behavior) and a track record of building that rigor into a team's default practices.
- Experience managing the lifecycle of a widely-consumed library: releases, breaking changes, deprecation and migration paths, and documentation that keeps adoption smooth.
- Ability to partner directly with designers and design leadership, translating visual and interaction intent into technical constraints and component contracts.
- Excellent judgment about when to invest in reusable abstractions versus one-off solutions, and the communication skills to explain those tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- A history of mentoring engineers and elevating the technical level of a team, through code review, design docs, and pragmatic, hands-on leadership.
- Experience working transparently in a distributed team - clear written communication, async-first collaboration, and open-source or open development practices.
- Curiosity about how AI can improve design system workflows, paired with the judgment to hold a high bar for correctness and quality in whatever ships.
Benefits
- Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
- Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
- Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Generous number of vacation days each year
- Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
- Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
- Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave