Software Engineer II [UX Engineer – Design System]

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Senior UX Engineer – Design System

Company: Chewy

Location: Boston, MA, United States / Minneapolis, MN, United States

Job Type: FULL_TIME

Category: Engineering / Design Systems

Date Posted: 2026-05-26

Experience Level: 5-10 Years

Remote Status: On-site

🚀 Role Summary

• Architect and develop scalable, accessible UI primitives using React and TypeScript to power enterprise-wide experiences.

• Build and maintain robust theming systems and design tokens, ensuring consistency across multiple platforms.

• Enhance developer experience by creating comprehensive documentation, tooling, and guardrails for the design system.

• Drive the adoption and evolution of the design system, collaborating closely with product design, accessibility, and frontend platform teams.

• Ensure all components adhere to WCAG accessibility standards and implement advanced ARIA patterns for inclusive design.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role is specifically focused on building the foundational UI components and tooling for Chewy's enterprise-wide design system. The emphasis is on creating reusable, accessible, and business-logic-agnostic primitives that enable product teams to accelerate development while maintaining a cohesive user experience. The "UX Engineer" title signifies a deep collaboration between engineering and design principles, with a strong focus on developer ergonomics and end-user experience.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Architect and develop composable, extensible, and performant UI primitives using React and TypeScript.

• Design and implement advanced CSS architecture, including comprehensive theming strategies, design tokens, and CSS variables.

• Ensure strict adherence to WCAG 2.x accessibility standards, including deep implementation of ARIA patterns and semantic HTML.

• Establish robust patterns for component composition, state management boundaries, and overall system extensibility.

• Drive API design decisions for components, prioritizing developer ergonomics, maintainability, and long-term scalability.

• Collaborate with Product Designers to translate Figma designs and design token specifications into engineering abstractions.

• Develop and maintain high-quality documentation, usage guidelines, and code examples for the design system components (e.g., using Storybook, MDX).

• Create tooling, linting rules, and automated checks to prevent design system fragmentation and enforce best practices.

• Partner with application teams to support their adoption of the design system and resolve integration challenges.

• Evaluate and optimize the performance implications of component architecture, aiming for lightweight and efficient foundations.

• Contribute to the long-term strategy and architectural decisions for Chewy's frontend platform.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities highlight a deep dive into system design and developer enablement. Key areas include API design for reusable components, advanced CSS architecture for theming, and proactive measures to prevent fragmentation. The role requires not just building components but also fostering adoption and ensuring the long-term health and scalability of the design system.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education:

Experience:

• 5+ years of professional experience building modern frontend applications.

Required Skills:

• Deep expertise in React and TypeScript, including advanced patterns like compound components, polymorphic components, hooks architecture, and controlled/uncontrolled APIs.

• Strong command of CSS architecture, including theming strategies, design tokens, CSS-in-JS, or other modern styling approaches.

• Proven experience building, maintaining, and scaling reusable component libraries consumed by multiple teams.

• Deep understanding of web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.x), ARIA patterns, and semantic HTML.

• Experience architecting frontend systems designed for consumption by diverse engineering teams.

• Strong understanding of component API design principles and developer ergonomics.

• Experience creating or contributing significantly to documentation systems (e.g., Storybook, MDX).

Preferred Skills:

• Experience implementing multi-brand or multi-theme architectures.

• Familiarity with design token pipelines and automation workflows.

• Experience with frontend build tooling, bundling strategies, and performance optimization techniques for component libraries.

• Experience creating code mods or migration tooling to support system evolution and upgrades.

• Proven ability to mentor other engineers and establish frontend development standards.

• Background in e-commerce or high-scale consumer platforms.

• Experience working within Agile development environments.

📝 Enhancement Note: The distinction between required and preferred skills emphasizes the need for deep technical proficiency in React and TypeScript, coupled with a systems-thinking approach to design. The "bonus" section highlights areas that would make a candidate particularly valuable, such as direct experience with enterprise design systems, theming, and developer tooling for adoption.

📊 Process & Systems Portfolio Requirements

Portfolio Essentials:

• Showcase of reusable component libraries built and maintained, demonstrating architectural patterns and API design.

• Case studies detailing the development and implementation of design systems or significant UI frameworks.

• Examples of complex theming systems or design token implementations.

• Demonstrations of accessible component development, including adherence to WCAG standards and ARIA implementation.

Process Documentation:

• Workflow diagrams or explanations of how design systems are integrated into product development lifecycles.

• Examples of processes for managing component versions, updates, and migrations.

• Documentation outlining strategies for ensuring consistency, accessibility, and performance across a design system.

• Examples of tooling or automation developed to support design system adoption and maintenance.

📝 Enhancement Note: For a role focused on design systems, the portfolio is crucial. Candidates should be prepared to showcase not just individual components but the overarching architecture, the process of building and scaling a system, and the strategies employed for developer adoption and accessibility. Demonstrating impact on engineering velocity and user experience consistency will be key.

💵 Compensation & Benefits

Salary Range: $120,000 - $190,000.00 USD per year.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive health insurance package, including Medical/Rx, Vision, Dental, Life, Disability, Hospital Indemnity, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance.

• Generous parental leave and family services benefits, including backup dependent care.

• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) and Telemedicine services.

• Pet adoption reimbursement and Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Significant discounts: 10% off pet insurance and 20% off Chewy.com.

• Equity grants: New hire and annual equity grants are available.

• Annual Bonus: Potential eligibility for an annual bonus for C08+ positions.

• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO): For exempt salary team members, subject to manager approval.

• Six paid holidays per year.

Working Hours:

• Standard full-time hours (approximately 40 hours per week).

• Unlimited PTO for exempt team members offers flexibility, subject to manager approval.

📝 Enhancement Note: The salary range is competitive for a Senior UX Engineer role in major tech hubs. The extensive benefits package, particularly the equity grants, bonus potential, and unlimited PTO, highlights Chewy's commitment to employee well-being and retention. The mention of "C08+ positions" suggests a tiered leveling system within the engineering organization.

🎯 Team & Company Context

🏢 Company Culture

Industry: E-commerce / Pet Supplies Retail. Chewy operates as a leading online retailer for pet products, focusing on customer experience, convenience, and a wide selection of pet-related items.

Company Size: Chewy is a large enterprise, indicating a complex organizational structure and significant scale of operations, which translates to large-scale technical challenges and opportunities for impact.

Founded: Chewy was founded in 2011, positioning it as a relatively young but established player in the e-commerce space, known for rapid growth and a strong digital-first approach.

Team Structure:

• The role sits within the "strong Storefront engineering team" at Chewy.

• The Design System team is a specialized group focused on building foundational UI primitives and tooling.

• This team collaborates closely with Product Design, Accessibility, and Frontend Platform teams, indicating a cross-functional, collaborative environment.

Methodology:

• Emphasis on building "composable, accessible, and business-logic-agnostic UI primitives."

• Focus on "scalable architecture, robust theming systems, and world-class developer experience."

• Development practices likely involve Agile methodologies, with a strong emphasis on code quality, testing, and documentation.

• Data-driven decision-making is implied through the focus on performance and user experience optimization.

Company Website: https://www.chewy.com/

📝 Enhancement Note: Chewy's culture likely revolves around customer obsession, innovation in e-commerce, and a fast-paced, growth-oriented environment. For a design system role, this means the work directly impacts the experience of millions of pet owners and supports the velocity of numerous internal product teams. The company's scale suggests a need for robust, well-documented, and highly performant systems.

📈 Career & Growth Analysis

Operations Career Level: Senior UX Engineer – Design System. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on a specialized area of frontend development. It requires deep technical expertise and architectural thinking, with a significant impact on engineering efficiency and product consistency across the organization.

Reporting Structure: The role reports into the Storefront engineering team, likely to an Engineering Manager or Lead focused on platform or frontend infrastructure. Collaboration will be extensive with Product Design, Accessibility, and other Frontend Platform teams.

Operations Impact: The work directly influences the consistency, quality, accessibility, and development velocity of all product teams leveraging the design system. It's foundational to the user experience of Chewy's web platforms and impacts the efficiency of hundreds of engineers.

Growth Opportunities:

• Technical Specialization: Deepen expertise in design systems, frontend architecture, accessibility, and performance optimization.

• Leadership: Opportunity to mentor junior engineers, set technical standards, and influence frontend platform strategy. Potential to lead specific initiatives within the design system.

• Cross-Functional Influence: Gain broad exposure to various product domains and collaborate closely with design, product management, and other engineering disciplines.

• Architectural Impact: Contribute to major architectural decisions shaping the future of Chewy's frontend landscape.

• Career Progression: Potential to move into Principal UX Engineer, Staff Engineer, or Engineering Management roles within platform or product engineering.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role offers significant growth for engineers passionate about foundational systems and developer experience. The impact is broad, and the opportunity to influence technical direction is substantial. Progression paths could lead to highly influential technical leadership roles or management within specialized engineering teams.

🌐 Work Environment

Office Type: On-site. The role requires physical presence in the office, suggesting a preference for in-person collaboration, whiteboard sessions, and team synergy.

Office Location(s): Boston, MA (BOS1) and Minneapolis, MN. Candidates can be based in either of these major metropolitan areas.

Workspace Context:

• A collaborative office environment is expected, facilitating direct interaction with design, product, and fellow engineers.

• Access to modern development tools and technologies will be standard.

• Opportunities for informal knowledge sharing, pair programming, and team discussions will be prevalent.

Work Schedule:

• Standard full-time work schedule.

• While the role is on-site, the "Unlimited PTO" policy for exempt team members suggests a culture that values work-life balance and trusts employees to manage their time effectively, subject to manager approval and business needs.

📝 Enhancement Note: The on-site requirement indicates Chewy's emphasis on in-person collaboration for its engineering teams, especially for roles that involve deep cross-functional partnerships like this one. Candidates should be prepared for a structured, team-oriented office environment.

📄 Application & Portfolio Review Process

Interview Process:

• Initial Screening: HR or recruiter call to assess basic qualifications, interest, and cultural fit.

• Technical Screen: Typically a coding challenge or live coding session focusing on React, TypeScript, and problem-solving relevant to component development.

• Hiring Manager Interview: Discussion about experience, role expectations, team dynamics, and career aspirations.

• System Design / Architectural Interview: Focus on how candidates approach building scalable, reusable, and accessible UI systems. May involve whiteboard exercises or case studies related to design systems.

• Panel Interviews: Sessions with potential peers (engineers, designers) to assess technical depth, collaboration style, and problem-solving approach.

• Final Round: Potentially with a senior leader to discuss overall fit, strategic thinking, and long-term vision.

Portfolio Review Tips:

• Highlight System Thinking: Showcase projects that demonstrate architectural design, reusability, and scalability, not just individual components.

• Focus on Impact: Quantify the impact of your work, e.g., "reduced development time by X%", "improved accessibility scores by Y%", "increased component adoption by Z%".

• Demonstrate Accessibility: Clearly articulate your approach to web accessibility (WCAG, ARIA) and provide examples of how you've implemented it.

• Showcase Documentation & DX: Include examples of documentation, usage guidelines, or tooling you've created to improve developer experience.

• Explain Your Process: Be ready to walk through your design and development process for key projects, explaining your technical choices and trade-offs.

• Tailor to Chewy: Research Chewy's current web presence and consider how your design system expertise could benefit their platform.

Challenge Preparation:

• React/TypeScript Proficiency: Practice common React patterns, hooks, and advanced TypeScript concepts.

• CSS Architecture: Be prepared to discuss CSS-in-JS, design tokens, CSS variables, and theming strategies.

• Accessibility: Review WCAG guidelines and common ARIA patterns.

• Design System Concepts: Understand principles of component composition, API design, theming, and developer experience.

• System Design: Practice designing scalable frontend architectures and component libraries.

📝 Enhancement Note: The interview process will likely be rigorous, focusing heavily on technical skills, architectural thinking, and collaboration. A strong portfolio that clearly demonstrates experience with design systems, accessibility, and developer enablement is critical for success. Candidates should be prepared to discuss their contributions to past systems in detail.

🛠 Tools & Technology Stack

Primary Tools:

• Frontend Framework: React

• Language: TypeScript

• Styling: CSS-in-JS (e.g., Styled Components, Emotion), CSS Modules, or other modern CSS approaches; Design Tokens; CSS Variables.

• Component Library Development: Storybook, MDX

• Version Control: Git

• Build Tools: Webpack, Vite, or similar (likely managed by a frontend platform team)

Analytics & Reporting:

CRM & Automation:

• Not directly applicable to this role, but understanding how frontend components integrate with backend services and potentially customer-facing platforms is important.

📝 Enhancement Note: Proficiency in React and TypeScript is paramount. Experience with Storybook for documentation and development, along with a deep understanding of modern CSS architecture and accessibility standards, are key technical requirements. Familiarity with design token systems and their implementation is also critical.

👥 Team Culture & Values

Operations Values:

• Customer Obsession: A strong focus on delivering excellent experiences for pet parents, which translates to building high-quality, user-friendly interfaces.

• Innovation: Encouraging new ideas and approaches to solve complex problems in the e-commerce space.

• Collaboration: Working effectively across teams (design, engineering, product) to achieve shared goals.

• Ownership & Accountability: Taking responsibility for the design system's success, from development to adoption.

• Data-Driven Decisions: Using data and user feedback to inform design and development choices.

• Efficiency & Velocity: Enabling other teams to build faster and more consistently through a robust design system.

Collaboration Style:

• Highly collaborative, involving close partnerships with Product Design, Accessibility experts, and Frontend Platform engineers.

• Emphasis on clear communication, feedback loops, and shared ownership of the design system's success.

• Expectation of proactive engagement with application teams to support their use of the system.

📝 Enhancement Note: Chewy likely fosters a culture of fast-paced innovation common in e-commerce. For this role, collaboration with design is paramount, and a proactive approach to enabling other engineering teams through the design system will be highly valued. The company's focus on pet ownership may also infuse a sense of purpose and community into the work environment.

⚡ Challenges & Growth Opportunities

Challenges:

• Scaling the Design System: Evolving the design system to meet the growing needs of a large enterprise across multiple domains and applications.

• Driving Adoption: Ensuring consistent adoption and correct usage of the design system across diverse engineering teams with varying levels of familiarity.

• Maintaining Consistency: Balancing the need for flexibility with the requirement for strict consistency across all user interfaces.

• Technical Debt Management: Proactively addressing technical debt within the component library and managing system evolution.

• Cross-Team Dependencies: Navigating dependencies and priorities with multiple product teams and stakeholders.

Learning & Development Opportunities:

• Deepen Expertise: Become a subject matter expert in design systems, frontend architecture, and web accessibility at scale.

• Influence Platform Strategy: Contribute to high-level technical decisions shaping Chewy's frontend ecosystem.

• Mentorship: Opportunity to mentor junior engineers and share best practices in frontend development and design systems.

• Industry Exposure: Potential to attend conferences or engage with the wider design systems community.

• E-commerce Domain: Gain in-depth understanding of the e-commerce landscape and its unique technical challenges.

📝 Enhancement Note: The primary challenge will be managing the complexity and scale of an enterprise design system. Growth opportunities are substantial for those who excel in system design, collaboration, and technical leadership within a specialized domain.

💡 Interview Preparation

Strategy Questions:

• "Describe a time you architected a reusable component library. What were the key design decisions and trade-offs?"

• "How do you approach ensuring accessibility compliance (WCAG/ARIA) in your component development?"

• "Walk us through your process for translating design specifications (e.g., from Figma) into robust, scalable engineering code."

• "How would you handle a situation where a product team wants to deviate significantly from the design system?"

• "What are your strategies for driving adoption of a design system within an organization?"

Company & Culture Questions:

• "What interests you about Chewy and our mission?"

• "How do you collaborate with designers on a day-to-day basis?"

• "Describe your experience working in an Agile environment."

Portfolio Presentation Strategy:

• Structure: Organize your portfolio by project, highlighting your role, the problem addressed, your solution (focusing on design system aspects), and the impact.

• Technical Depth: Be prepared to dive deep into the technical implementation of your examples, explaining architectural choices, API design, and accessibility considerations.

• Visuals: Use clear visuals (screenshots, demos, links to live examples if possible) to illustrate your work.

• Storytelling: Frame your contributions as stories demonstrating problem-solving, collaboration, and measurable outcomes.

• Focus on Design System Principles: Emphasize how your work aligns with principles of reusability, scalability, accessibility, and developer experience.

📝 Enhancement Note: Interview preparation should focus on articulating your experience with design systems, React, TypeScript, and accessibility. Be ready to discuss specific architectural decisions, challenges faced, and the impact of your work. Quantifiable achievements are highly beneficial.

📌 Application Steps

To apply for this UX Engineer position:

• Submit your application through the provided link on the Chewy careers portal.

• Resume Optimization: Tailor your resume to highlight experience with React, TypeScript, design systems, component libraries, accessibility (WCAG, ARIA), and CSS architecture. Use keywords from the job description.

• Portfolio Preparation: Curate your portfolio to showcase relevant projects, focusing on design systems, reusable components, and accessibility implementations. Prepare a concise walkthrough of 1-2 key projects.

• Interview Practice: Practice answering common interview questions related to React, system design, accessibility, and collaboration. Prepare specific examples from your experience.

• Company Research: Familiarize yourself with Chewy's products, mission, and recent developments. Consider how your role contributes to their overall business objectives.

⚠️ Important Notice: This enhanced job description includes AI-generated insights and operations industry-standard assumptions. All details should be verified directly with the hiring organization before making application decisions.