Staff Design Engineer
Mixpanel · Remote · San Francisco, United States · 2mo ago
About Mixpanel
Mixpanel is the leading product intelligence and analytics platform, trusted by more than 29,000 companies to help understand how people use the products they build. By combining powerful analytics with AI that knows your business, Mixpanel helps teams see what’s working, diagnose what’s not, and decide what to build next. Learn more at mixpanel.com.
About the role
At Mixpanel, we believe design excellence is a competitive moat. In a world where AI makes it easier than ever to ship, we believe the quality of the experience — how it feels, how it builds trust, how it handles complexity with grace — that separates good products from great ones.
As a Staff Design Engineer at Mixpanel, you'll sit within the design organization and lead the transformation of our design system from a component library into something far more important: the infrastructure that powers how we design, build, and ship in an AI-native world. You'll encode our craft, standards, and vision directly into the systems, tools, and workflows that every designer, engineer, and AI agent in our org builds on.
This isn't a maintenance or systems stewardship role. It's a transformative one. You'll work at the frontier of what design and engineering collaboration looks like when AI writes most of the code, agents prototype from intent, and the design system is less a library and more a living foundation for everything we ship.
You'll be the designer who ships production code. The engineer who holds an uncompromising craft bar. The person who sees the future of how Mixpanel will look and behave in an AI-native world, and builds the infrastructure to make it real.
What you'll do
Build the infrastructure for an AI-native design practice
Translate Mixpanel's design standards, principles, and taste into systems that live in the code. Build a token system, component library, documentation, and guidelines that AI agents, AI coding tools, and AI prototyping workflows can reliably build on. Evolve our design system to be foundational infrastructure for AI-assisted workflows.
Shape how Mixpanel looks and behaves in an AI-native world
Sit within the product design team and collaborate on reimagining Mixpanel for a world where interfaces are conversational, agentic, and adaptive. You have the rare combination of deep design sensibility and production engineering skills, and you’ll use both to help bring our AI product vision to life with craft and coherence that generic AI outputs can't match.
Own the bridge between design and code
Build systems that connect design to code and keep the two in sync. Define what "shippable" looks like as AI writes more of the code. Work directly in the codebase. Ship PRs that improve the product. Make design a force multiplier for engineering, not a bottleneck.
Stand up prototyping and AI tooling infrastructure
Build the workflows, tools, and infrastructure that let designers and PMs prototype at high fidelity, with working code, real components, and interactive states, without waiting on engineering. Identify the places where design and engineering lose time, intent, or quality in the handoff, and build AI-powered workflows that close those gaps.
Set and model the craft bar
Establish what great looks like — not through documentation alone, but through the quality of what you ship. Enable designers to work more code-adjacent and engineers to build with better components. Stay ahead of how AI is changing EPD workflows and bring that change into the org responsibly.
What success looks like
- The design system is a reliable foundation that AI tools and agents build on, not an obstacle they work around
- Design and code are in sync; the gap between what's designed and what ships is closed
- Designers can prototype at high fidelity without waiting on engineering
- Engineers spend less time on UI polish and rework, more time on features
- The Mixpanel product feels unmistakably itself — cohesive, expressive, and craft-forward — as it evolves into an AI-native experience
- The org is enabled on the latest AI-assisted design and development workflows
Qualifications
- Proficiency in modern front-end frameworks: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Next.js
- Experience with design systems. Ideally you've built or overhauled one at scale
- Strong design sensibility: you care about craft, consistency, interaction quality, and taste
- Fluency in AI-assisted workflows: canvas-to-code, code-to-canvas, AI prototyping tools, MCP integrations, and what's emerging in this space
- Experience working with tools like Figma, Storybook, VSCode, Chromatic, and GitHub
- A track record of working across design and engineering: you've done both, and you know how to collaborate across both
- Comfortable operating with high autonomy: you set direction, influence standards, and manage complex projects without a lot of hand-holding
- 8+ years in design engineering, UX engineering, design technology, or a related hybrid role
Bonus points
- Experience designing or building data visualizations
- Background in brand and/or product design
- Experience with accessibility: WCAG 2.2, ARIA patterns, semantic HTML, APCA, accessible data viz
- Experience working in a product analytics or developer-focused product environment
Compensation
The amount listed below is the total target cash compensation (TTCC) and includes base compensation and variable compensation in the form of either a company bonus or commissions. Variable compensation type is determined by your role and level. In addition to the cash compensation provided, this position is also eligible for equity consideration and other benefits including medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage. You can view our benefits offerings here.
Our salary ranges are determined by role and level and are benchmarked to the SF Bay Area Technology data cut released by Radford, a global compensation database. The range displayed represents the minimum and maximum TTCC for new hire salaries for the position across all of our US locations. To stay on top of market conditions, we refresh our salary ranges twice a year so these ranges may change in the future. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, job-related skills, qualifications, and other factors. If you have questions about the specific range, your recruiter can share this information.
Benefits and Perks
- Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care
- Mental Wellness Benefit
- Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays
- Enhanced Parental Leave
- Volunteer Time Off
- Additional US Benefits: Pre-Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break
*please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary*
Culture Values
- Make Bold Bets: We choose courageous action over comfortable progress.
- Innovate with Insight: We tackle decisions with rigor and judgment - combining data, experience and collective wisdom to drive powerful outcomes.
- One Team: We collaborate across boundaries to achieve far greater impact than any of us could accomplish alone.
- Candor with Connection: We build meaningful relationships that enable honest feedback and direct conversations.
- Champion the Customer: We seek to deeply understand our customers’ needs, ensuring their success is our north star.
- Powerful Simplicity: We find elegant solutions to complex problems, making sophisticated things accessible.
Why choose Mixpanel?
We’re a leader in analytics with over 29,000 customers and $277M invested from prominent investors: like Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, YC, and, most recently, Bain Capital. Mixpanel’s pioneering event-based data analytics platform offers a powerful yet simple solution for companies to understand user behaviors and easily track overarching company success metrics. Our accomplished teams continuously facilitate our expansion by tackling the ever-evolving challenges tied to scaling, reliability, design, and service. Choosing to work at Mixpanel means you’ll be helping the world’s most innovative companies learn from their data so they can make better decisions.
Mixpanel is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. At Mixpanel, we are focused on things that really matter—our people, our customers, our partners—out of a recognition that those relationships are the most valuable assets we have. We actively encourage women, people with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or other similar laws that may be applicable, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We’ve immersed ourselves in our Culture and Values as our guiding principles for the impact we want to have and the future we are building.