AI Design Engineer

ABOUT US

Virtuous is on a mission to inspire global generosity by helping nonprofits build better relationships with their donors. We offer a modern software platform that provides mid-sized charities with elegant tools for fundraising, marketing, volunteerism, and online giving.

Our talented team is driven to disrupt the status quo in the nonprofit sector. We are hungry, humble, and committed to delivering best-in-class software solutions, customer success interactions, and sales experiences to the world’s leading nonprofits

We also recognize the importance of giving back and making a difference in the communities where we live and work. That's why we practice radical generosity by volunteering at nonprofits or going the extra mile for our team and the customers we serve. We take our work seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We believe that life is too short not to love what you do.

The ideal candidate for Virtuous embodies our values by:

• Asking questions with a spirit of curiosity
• Giving feedback freely with candor & grace, welcoming it in return
• Displaying a passion for philanthropy and technology
• Serving with joy. Everyone is willing to make the coffee!
• Celebrating the wins & milestones of others
• Assuming good intent & demonstrating trust in others
• Pursuing relationships with people different from themselves & creates space to be human

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 shipped
• Direct experience owning a design system used by multiple teams across multiple products, in production. Not a just a component library or a Figma file
• A 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 it
• Genuine 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 it
• Strong engineering fundamentals: Vue, React, component architecture, CSS at scale, performance, and testing
• Hands on with AI tooling as part of your build workflow, including prototyping
• Accessibility fluency, and the instinct to solve it structurally rather than case by case
• Comfort working with designers as partners, and the credibility to push back
• Excellent written communication. Your documentation is part of the product

Nice 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 default
• Coverage is growing on the modern core, and new surfaces ship on the design system without a gate
• Teams can ship a new pattern this cycle without going around the system, and good patterns are getting promoted into the core
• Generated interfaces land on brand because the system makes it hard not to
• Accessibility is structural rather than remembered
• Throughput is increasing, cycle time is decreasing
• Designers and engineers are working from the same source of truth

What We Offer

• Market competitive pay leveraging Carta data
• Employee recognition through Bonusly (birthdays, anniversaries, achievements, etc.)
• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching- 50% match up to 6% of compensation after 90 days
• We value our employee’s work-life balance and encourage taking advantage of Unlimited PTO
• Supportive time off including paid volunteer days and company holidays
• Employer-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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