Staff Engineer (Design Systems)

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike—with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’.

The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.

We at Pleo are on a mission to make spend management surprisingly effective and empowering. We build a product used by thousands of companies across Europe, and our design system is a core part of delivering a consistent, accessible, high-quality experience.

We’re hiring a Staff Engineer to join the Design Systems team. This will help lead the engineering direction and execution of our design system across web and mobile.

What Design Systems does

• Own and evolve Telescope, Pleo’s design system (components, patterns, guidelines, and tooling).

• Enable product teams to ship faster with consistent UI, accessibility, and quality.

• Partner with Design and Engineering across the company to drive adoption and improve the contribution experience.

• Steward shared foundations (tokens, components, documentation, and best practices).

What you’ll be doing

As a Staff Tech Lead Engineer in Design Systems, you will be a force multiplier for product delivery and UI quality across Pleo

• Set technical direction for key parts of Telescope (architecture, component standards, release practices, and quality bars)

• Drive and evolve our contribution model and how teams interact with Design Systems

• Own and improve how requests flow into the team (triage, prioritisation, and expectations)

• Improve the developer and contributor experience through tooling and automation, including:

• Design system visual testing and workflows

• Supporting internal operational needs where relevant

• Improving how we measure and communicate adoption and system health

• Evolving our docs publishing workflow

• Lead rituals that keep the team effective and aligned

• Represent Design Systems in cross-team initiatives and align stakeholders across Design and Engineering

• Coach and mentor engineers, and help grow technical leadership in the frontend community

• Contribute hands-on in code. This role blends strategy and execution. You should expect to be coding a meaningful part of the time.

You’ll bring solid experience with

• Building and maintaining component libraries or platform-like products that serve multiple teams.

• TypeScript and modern frontend engineering (React experience is a plus).

• Designing maintainable systems with clear boundaries, versioning, and backwards compatibility.

• Testing practices and tooling (unit, integration, end-to-end) and a strong quality mindset.

• Accessibility and performance best practices for UI systems.

• Collaboration with designers and product engineers, and navigating tradeoffs across stakeholders.

Your colleagues would say you

• Lead by example and raise the bar with pragmatism and care.

• Communicate clearly, listen well, and bring people along in decisions.

• Enjoy breaking down complex problems, gathering input, and driving to a solution.

• Coach others and create space for people to grow.

• Prefer progress over perfection, while still caring deeply about quality.

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)

• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office 🍜

• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis

• We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays

• For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options

• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice

• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far ❤️‍🩹

• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶

About your application

• Please submit your application in English; it’s our company language so you’ll be speaking lots of it if you join 💕

• We treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our application system - any correspondence should come from there! Our lovely support team isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone 😊

• We can only achieve our goals if our team reflects the diversity of the world around us - and that starts with you, hitting apply, even if you are worried you might not tick all the boxes. We embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply - regardless of race/ethnicity, colour, religion, nationality, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, neurodiversity, socio-economic status, culture or beliefs.

• When you submit an application we process your personal data as a data processor. Find out more about how your data is used in the FAQs section at the bottom of our jobs page.