Principal Design Engineer

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

A Little About Us

Yahoo’s Central Foundations team owns the surface where our designers and engineers do their work—where AI-assisted generation meets direct manipulation, producing production-ready code. Every interaction on our platform must feel trustworthy, fast, and precise. We are building the next generation of creative and engineering tooling, ensuring our internal teams have powerful, intuitive, and highly responsive workflows to ship world-class digital experiences. We believe great tools are designed, not just built, and we hold our own product to the same craft standard as the work it produces.

A Lot About You

You are an engineer with a deep passion for interaction design, craft, and toolmaking. You sweat the details of how software feels—from micro-interactions and motion to panel layouts and keyboard navigation—and you have the technical depth to build and ship those experiences yourself. You have a trained visual eye: you notice when spacing is off by a pixel, when hierarchy is muddy, or when a state feels unfinished, and you care enough to fix it. You thrive at the intersection of UI development, motion design, and product engineering, treating design system constraints as leverage to raise the bar for user experience. You’re a natural, low-ego collaborator who proactively seeks solutions to critical problems. You’re just as at home in a design critique as in a code review, and you welcome feedback as a way to make the work better.

Responsibilities

• Design & Engineering Execution: Design and build the tool's core interactions, including selection systems, direct manipulation mechanics, panel layouts, keyboard navigation, and UI states around AI generation.
• Visual & Interaction Design: Help shape the visual language of the tool itself, including layout, hierarchy, typography, motion, and component states, so it feels cohesive and expressive.
• Interactive & Motion Authoring: Own how interactive and motion behavior is authored, implemented, and previewed within the platform.
• Production Delivery: Ship production-quality code using React and TypeScript following standard git branching, peer review, and continuous integration workflows.
• Customer-Centric Iteration: Partner directly with internal product teams using the tool daily, turning user feedback, friction points, and edge cases into shipped features through observation, rapid prototyping, and thoughtful design exploration.
• Quality & Standards: Raise the bar for interaction quality, accessibility, and performance across the engineering organization through code/design reviews, interactive prototypes, and documented UI standards.
• Collaboration & Communication: Act as a bridge between design and engineering, proactively surfacing problems, proposing solutions, and keeping both disciplines aligned on intent and tradeoffs. Seek out feedback in critiques and reviews, and respond to it thoughfully.

Qualifications

• Experience: 8+ years of relevant experience. Proven track record of shipping interactive tools that users rely on (e.g., editors, design/creative software, canvas tools, or complex internal platforms).
• Technical Proficiency: Strong, hands-on experience building the interactive UI components you design using modern React and TypeScript in a production environment.
• Visual Design Fundamentals: Strong command of typography, layout, color, spacing, and hierarchy, with attention to detail that holds up at the pixel level.
• Interaction & Motion Craft: Deep understanding of motion, micro-interactions, and visual feedback, with the ability to articulate why specific interaction patterns succeed or fail.
• Design Process: Comfortable moving from problem framing to exploration, prototype, and polished UI, and able to clearly explain the reasoning and tradeoffs behind design decisions.
• Design Systems: Demonstrated experience building with or contributing to design systems, using systemic constraints to build coherent, scalable interfaces.
• Portfolio Required: A clickable portfolio or demo showing live, interactive web applications or design tools you have designed and built. Work should show strong visual and technical skill, a high level of craft, and clear design thinking, including the problem, your process, and the decisions you made.

Preferred Qualifications

• Editor Architecture: Hands-on experience with rendering optimization, direct manipulation patterns, spatial layouts, or editor software architecture.
• AI UI/UX Insights: Hands-on experience working with AI-generated UI systems, LLM-driven interfaces, or canvas-based generation tools, along with a sharp perspective on current UX limitations and failure modes.
• Performance & Accessibility: Knowledge of web performance profiling (frame rates, render cycles) and accessible interaction patterns (keyboard traps, screen reader navigation in complex tools).

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies; exercising sound judgment; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love! While most roles don’t require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You’ll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter!

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form (www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html) or call +1.866.772.3182. Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens Yahoo and deepens our relationships. When you support everyone to be their best selves, they spark discovery, innovation and creativity. Among other efforts, our 11 employee resource groups (ERGs) enhance a culture of belonging with programs, events and fellowship that help educate, support and create a workplace where all feel welcome.

The compensation for this position ranges from $136,125.00 - $283,750.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.