Staff Software Engineer, Design System

What you'll do:

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Design Systems Engineer. You will be the foundational engineer responsible for designing, building, and scaling NinjaTrader’s new enterprise-grade design system, which will serve as a core frontend platform across multiple product teams in a regulated, high-availability trading environment. This role is expected to help shape the long-term evolution of the design systems function, including mentoring future contributors and team members, and carries clear technical ownership and decision-making authority for the design system as a shared frontend platform across the organization.

In this role you will:

• Own the development, maintenance, and evolution of NinjaTrader’s design system, including UI components, patterns, tokens, and documentation; this includes defining system standards, architectural direction, and long-term technical strategy
• Act as the technical authority for how designs are translated into production UI, partnering with Design while maintaining final responsibility for engineering quality, performance, and maintainability
• Make and defend tradeoffs between consistency, flexibility, velocity, and performance on behalf of the broader engineering organization
• Build and maintain a component library using modern frontend technologies, ensuring components are accessible, performant, and easy to consume across teams
• Establish and enforce best practices for consistency, accessibility (WCAG), responsiveness, and cross-browser compatibility
• Collaborate with other frontend engineers to support adoption of the design system, guide implementation, and continuously improve developer experiences
• Influence adoption through technical leadership rather than direct reporting authority
• Design scalable CSS and styling architectures (e.g., tokens, theming, variables) that support multiple products, themes, and future growth
• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation, examples, and usage guidelines for designers and engineers
• Work closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to align the design system roadmap with business and product needs

What you'll need:

• 8+ years of professional experience in frontend engineering, design engineering, or design systems development
• Demonstrated experience building or leading a design system from early or intermediate stages, including architectural decisions, adoption challenges, and long-term maintenance
• Strong expertise in modern CSS and styling approaches (CSS-in-JS, CSS Modules, Tailwind, or similar), including theming and design tokens
• Proven experience partnering deeply with designers and translating design tools (e.g., Figma) into high-fidelity, production-ready components
• Strong knowledge of web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA) and experience building inclusive, accessible interfaces
• Experience supporting shared systems used by multiple teams or products, balancing consistency with flexibility
• Ability to balance design fidelity, performance, and accessibility in production systems
• Familiarity with modern frontend tooling and workflows (Storybook, Vite/Webpack, Yarn/NPM, testing frameworks)

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $160,000.00 - $210,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 15%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 23 days per year plus seven paid holidays.

Location:

This role is based in Chicago, IL. *There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.

Hybrid:

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer:

• 20 additional flex remote days annually
• 5 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays