Principal Front-End Engineer, Design Systems

Principal Front-End Engineer, Design Systems

This role has been designed as 'Hybrid' with a requirement that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.

Who We Are:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.

Job Description:

About the HPE Design System Team

The HPE Design System team translates HPE brand and experience standards into reusable assets and practical implementation guidance, connecting design intent, component behavior, accessibility, and the tools teams use to build and maintain products. We work across disciplines to understand product needs, review contributions, and evolve shared architecture. When evaluating changes, we consider their effect on existing consumers, opportunities to reuse new capabilities, and the documentation and support teams need for practical adoption. This work sits within Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which brings together data, AI, cloud, security, and networking to help organizations achieve more.

Why Join Us

This role offers the opportunity to shape shared UI architecture and engineering foundations used across HPE products, with technical influence extending beyond a single application. You'll tackle complex problems, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and help evolve reusable solutions that make it easier for product teams to deliver consistent, accessible experiences. Your work will span hands-on engineering, collaboration across disciplines, and contributions to the Grommet open-source community. We value thoughtful decision-making, shared ownership, practical experimentation, and helping one another grow.

What You Will Do

Core Design System Responsibilities

• •Lead the technical approach for complex or ambiguous problems that affect multiple products, from investigation through release. Weigh trade-offs in user value, reuse, compatibility, accessibility, and maintenance; resolve competing requirements with technical leads and partner teams; and drive sustainable solutions.
• •Help shape technical direction for accessible React and TypeScript components, reusable APIs, design tokens, themes, and shared UI foundations. Design and evolve these capabilities through hands-on engineering, keeping design assets, production code, documentation, and supported integrations aligned as the shared architecture evolves.
• •Evaluate requests and contributions for enterprise reuse and architectural fit, providing technical recommendations that balance cross-product needs with a coherent shared system.
• •Help establish clear acceptance criteria and guide contributors through review and remediation to meet accessibility, implementation, and maintainability expectations.
• •Lead quality outcomes for significant component initiatives using automated component testing, accessibility validation, and visual regression testing so product teams can adopt changes confidently.
• •Lead release readiness and lifecycle practices for significant component initiatives, collaborating with contributors on dependency and security updates, package management, CI/CD, versioning, backward compatibility, and migration guidance. Carry technical decisions through release and ongoing maintenance, so shared capabilities remain supportable as they evolve.
• •Create and improve documentation, examples, diagnostics, codemods, and other developer tooling that reduces adoption effort and supports consistent implementation across product teams.
• •Influence cross-product technical decisions by partnering with designers, engineers, accessibility specialists, and product teams and communicating technical trade-offs clearly. Mentor others and support contributors in the Grommet open-source community so they can understand, implement, and maintain agreed technical approaches.

AI-Assisted Delivery

• •Help shape and evolve interfaces, integrations, and machine-readable Design System assets so AI tools can reliably access and use approved components, tokens, guidance, metadata, and implementation patterns.
• •Lead the evaluation of AI-assisted workflows for significant initiatives, working with the team to define success criteria for design-to-code, prompt-to-code, documentation, accessibility evaluation, and remediation. Conduct practical evaluations, document results and limitations, and guide recommendations on which improvements to carry forward into team workflows.
• •Help advance automated checks and human-review practices to validate AI-assisted delivery for correct component and API usage, accessibility, brand alignment, security, performance, and maintainability. Contribute proven approaches to repeatable team workflows.

Required Qualifications

• •Extensive professional experience building and maintaining production front-end systems with React, TypeScript, modern JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
• •Significant experience with design systems, component libraries, shared platforms, or comparable reusable UI architecture serving multiple applications or teams.
• •Strong experience designing reusable components and APIs and working with design tokens, responsive behavior, and theming. Experience collaborating with designers to translate design intent into production code.
• •Practical experience implementing accessible interfaces and evaluating them against WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Evaluation experience must include automated and manual methods, including keyboard interaction, focus management, and screen reader testing.
• •Experience validating reusable UI components through automated component testing and visual regression testing.
• •Experience guiding release readiness and lifecycle decisions for reusable UI components, including versioning, backward compatibility, and migrations. Experience contributing to the package management and CI/CD workflows that support those releases.
• •Demonstrated ability to independently lead significant, complex technical initiatives affecting multiple products or teams, from investigation through delivery and ongoing stewardship. This includes shaping shared architecture, exercising sound judgment in technical trade-offs, collaborating with other technical leads and partner teams, and demonstrating sustained outcomes from the resulting solutions.
• •Demonstrated experience communicating technical recommendations clearly, influencing cross-functional decisions, documenting approaches, reviewing code, and mentoring or guiding other engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• •Experience with Grommet or another mature open-source component library.
• •Experience with Storybook and component documentation.
• •Experience with Figma variables, design-to-code mappings, or Code Connect.
• •Experience with AI-assisted development workflows, structured component metadata, or MCP-based integrations.
• •Experience contributing to open-source projects and participating in library governance.
• •Experience with multi-theme architectures or automated design token pipelines.
• •Familiarity with component-library infrastructure, including monorepo tooling and build systems.
• •Familiarity with fundamental design principles, user-centered design, and design thinking methodologies.

You do not need to meet every preferred qualification to apply. If your experience aligns with most of this role, we encourage you to apply.

Education and Experience

Relevant background includes significant technical leadership