Role overview

Cohere is seeking a design engineer to build and maintain Waypoint, the company’s design system, across both Figma and production code. This role requires genuine fluency in both design and engineering—you’ll move seamlessly between defining component behavior in Figma and shipping those same components to npm. The position offers real ownership of a design system that is still early enough for your decisions to shape how it scales.

Key responsibilities

Own and evolve the Figma library including component structure, variants, properties, and documentation to serve as a reliable source of truth for design teams.
Build and maintain core Waypoint components, contributing directly to component packages alongside the design engineering team.
Manage the token pipeline to keep design tokens in Figma synchronized with their code representations, including CSS custom properties and Tailwind configuration.
Partner with product designers to translate new patterns into system components and with product engineers to ensure those components are easy to adopt correctly.
Define and refine workflows and tooling that connect Figma and code, including sync scripts, plugins, and documentation sites, rather than relying on manual handoffs.
Write clear documentation and usage guidance so the system scales without becoming a bottleneck.
Contribute to system architecture decisions such as when to add new components versus extend existing ones, how to handle versioning and packaging, and how to maintain consistency as the system grows.
Help shape how Waypoint evolves to serve AI systems as a third consumer beyond designers and engineers, thinking about how components, tokens, and patterns get structured to be legible to AI.

Requirements

Demonstrated fluency in both design tools like Figma and production code development.
Experience building or contributing to design-to-code sync tooling, such as Figma plugins or token pipelines.
Familiarity with accessibility standards like WCAG and how to integrate them into components.
Experience packaging and versioning component libraries for multiple consuming teams, including npm scoped packages and semantic versioning.
Exposure to multi-platform design systems work such as iOS/SwiftUI, Android/Jetpack Compose, or token build tools.
Experience in an AI-native product environment or genuine interest in how AI changes design system development and usage.

What makes this role worth considering

You’ll work alongside a team that treats design and engineering as a single discipline rather than separate departments handing work back and forth. Cohere is a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul. Full-time employees receive a weekly lunch stipend and comprehensive health and dental benefits.