Staff Design Systems Engineer

About Niche

Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply.

Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally.

About The Role

Every year, millions of families start the school search process. Students wade through a sea of information and decisions to make, and unfortunately access to help hasn’t changed much in decades: it’s not super clear what your options are, and you might not feel confident that a school is right for you, or think you’ll be able to afford it.

Niche is on a mission to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. Students need support choosing a school and paying for their education, schools want to find students who will thrive on their campus, and families need help supporting their students every step of the way. Niche helps ensure that it’s not just students already confident about college who get enrolled and can afford to attend.

We’re looking for a Staff Design Systems Engineer to help define what modern design-to-code looks like at Niche, starting with overhauling our design system Expedite in partnership with two dedicated Product Engineers and the rest of the Product Design team. This is an exciting UX engineering role that requires both frontend and design fluency and reports to the Senior Director of Product Design. You’ll build and ship accessible, production-ready components, create and use AI tooling and LLM guidelines, and help shape new design workflows.

You will work closely with designers and engineers to help shape the foundations, components, and patterns that product teams will rely on every day. Starting on day one, you will build your understanding of real product needs and then translate them into scalable systems, tools and processes, ensuring that they grow alongside the company. Your work will help unlock speed and quality across the Product org.

This role is ideal for a builder who is eager for more ownership. The biggest opportunities: scope of ownership and freedom to experiment, design the future of product design and development at Niche, and overhaul our design systems with your vision, agentic automation, and a lot of love. You will sit at the intersection of craft, systems thinking, collaboration, and design excellence, with senior leadership support and guidance on delivering your dreams to production. The Design team is so excited for this role to be open and can’t wait to work with you!

What You Will Do

Design, refine and ship reusable and accessible components, tokens, and interaction patterns that enable teams to build consistent, high-quality experiences across web and mobile

Contribute code to production and support Product Designers contributing code to production using agentic coding tools (Claude Code, custom internal tools)

Establish LLM guidelines that align with the design system, enabling engineers and designers to quickly generate and implement designs and prototypes aligned with the design system

Create internal guides and configure/create internal tooling to help Product Designers of varying technical levels adopt generative AI tooling in our daily workflows, making it possible for us to more directly improve and evolve the user-facing experience

Define and maintain Niche’s visual language, guideline documentation and component libraries, including typography, color, iconography, and UI patterns, for both people and AI agents (think Stitch’s Design.md )

Improve the contribution model so teams can effectively propose, build, and scale new components from real product use cases

Track the latest tools and resources, stay aware of what's available and recommending tools to adopt while being mindful of hype cycles

Clearly and honestly call out risks with reliance on AI tooling, strike a balance between short-term wins and long-term investments, and help advise on what people do best vs where agents can help

During the First Month:

Meet and get familiar with your engineering partners, the designers you're supporting, and key stakeholders across the Product org

Understand the company mission and vision, business model, and current state of the product

Get familiar with our design system Expedite, design tooling, and how designs are defined and handed off to Engineering

Shadow work in progress and perform a needs assessment with internal "customers" of Expedite to surface pain points and opportunities

Begin shaping a vision and strategy for a new design system…