AI Design Engineer

About Us Virtuous software is powering the world’s leading nonprofits and inspiring a new generation of generosity. At Virtuous, we believe generosity has the power to transform the world - and so we are on a mission to create $10B in net new generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their donors. Our talented team is hungry, humble, and committed to delivering best-in-class software solutions, customer success interactions, and sales experiences to the nonprofit community. Our values are more than just a poster on the wall. Instead, our mission and values are precisely why candidates choose Virtuous. Our core values are: Build Better: We build audacious ideas to accelerate philanthropy and dismantle the status quo.Display Radical Generosity: We are generous with our time & talent as we serve our team and the nonprofit community.Stay Humble & Enjoy the Journey: We take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. Virtuous should act as a career accelerator for everyone on our team. Team members should look back at their time at Virtuous as one of the most productive and stretching seasons in their professional lives. This means that working at Virtuous isn't for everybody. It is for the select few who are ready to do hard things and build something truly great. If this sounds like you, we’d love for you to apply! Position Summary At Virtuous, the design system is the leverage point for a unified experience across the entire product surface. Done well, it means every engineer ships work that looks and behaves like it was designed, without a review gate and without slowing down. This role owns that system. Not as a Figma library that drifts from production, but as a real product in code with real users, and those users are engineers. You own the tokens, the primitives, the components, and the adoption. You also build production interface work on the surfaces you cover. Responsibilities The design system. You own it end to end: tokens, primitives, components, patterns, and documentation, in code and not just in Figma. You own how it gets distributed and consumed, and and the process for updating and maintaining.The operating model. You decide how a team ships a pattern the system does not have yet without fragmenting everything, and how that pattern gets promoted into the core once it proves out. Stable primitives that move carefully, product patterns that move quickly, and a real path between them.Adoption. You treat engineers as your users. The system wins when building on it is faster than building around it, so you instrument coverage, watch for drift, and drive system adoption.Production interface work. You are in the codebase every week building real surface work, not adjacent to it. What you learn shipping is what makes the system good, and it is how you feel the lag before anyone has to report it.The AI guardrail. You make the system the thing that keeps generated interfaces on brand. When an engineer or an agent builds a screen, the system should make the right thing the easy thing. That means the system has to be legible to a model, not just to a person.Accessibility and the craft bar. You build accessibility into the system so what we ship is also accessible.The bridge from design to production. You work with product designers to turn validated patterns into system defaults, and you close the gap between what was designed and what actually shipped.Documentation and enablement. You make the system obvious. Nobody adopts what they have to reverse engineer.Metrics. You influence the numbers that prove the system works: component coverage across surfaces, adoption, efficiency, and throughput. How You Work AI-forward operator. You use AI as a default part of how you build, and you have opinions about what agents should own and what humans should own, because you have shipped things that way.Systems thinker with a product mindset. You think in primitives and constraints. You know the difference between a component and a special case, and you can tell when a system is being asked to do too much.Influence over authority. Nobody has to use what you build. They use it because it is faster and better. That standard keeps you honest.Pragmatic about process. You right size the governance to the team. Enough structure to hold the bar, not so much that shipping routes around you.Taste and rigor together. You care what it looks like and you care how it holds up under load. Both, always.Human centered. We believe AI should make the human parts of fundraising better, not replace them. That belief has to show up in what you build and how it feels to use.Ownership over territory. You see what needs to happen and you drive it with a bias toward starting. You Must Have 6+ years building production interfaces in a modern frontend stack, with real ownership of what shippedDirect experience owning a design system used by multiple teams across multiple products, in production. Not a just a component library or a Figma fileA real point of view on distribution and consumption: published package, registry, source distribution, or something else. You have lived with the tradeoffs and you can defend a recommendation, including how engineers and agents each consume itGenuine design sensibility. You don’t have to be a designer, but you can tell good from not good enough, and you can hold the line on itStrong engineering fundamentals: Vue, React, component architecture, CSS at scale, performance, and testingHands on with AI tooling as part of your build workflow, including prototypingAccessibility fluency, and the instinct to solve it structurally rather than case by caseComfort working with designers as partners, and the credibility to push backExcellent written communication. Your documentation is part of the productNice to have: Design token pipelines, Storybook, or equivalent. Figma fluency including Code Connect or MCP. Experience making a system consumable by AI tooling. Fundraising technology, nonprofit CRM, or the nonprofit sector. What Success Looks Like The system is in code, distributed in a way that fits how our engineers actually work, and they reach for it by defaultCoverage is growing on the modern core, and new surfaces ship on the design system without a gateTeams can ship a new pattern this cycle without going around the system, and good patterns are getting promoted into the coreGenerated interfaces land on brand because the system makes it hard not toAccessibility is structural rather than rememberedThroughput is increasing, cycle time is decreasingDesigners and engineers are working from the same source of truth What We Offer Market competitive pay leveraging Carta dataEmployee recognition through Bonusly (birthdays, anniversaries, achievements, etc.)401(k) retirement plan with company matching- 50% match up to 6% of compensation after 90 daysWe value our employee’s work-life balance and encourage taking advantage of Unlimited PTOSupportive time off including paid volunteer days and company holidaysEmployer-contributed healthcare benefits, encompassing medical, dental, and vision coverage, with plans available for dependents and choices for Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA).12 weeks primary parent leave, 4 weeks secondary parent leave - full pay (adoption as well)We pride ourselves on Community and host exciting company outings and events. 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