Job Description
UI Systems builds Square’s universal design system, Market. Market is deployed across all of Square’s seller-facing products on iOS, Android and web. This includes our flagship products Point of Sale, Square Register, and Square Terminal. Put simply, this team builds the public face of Square.
We’re not only building a design system, though, our mandate is wider than that: UI Systems is also building the core UI frameworks and tools needed to make building, testing, and maintaining UI easy and fast at scale: We’re supporting almost 200 iOS engineers and 1500+ screens across Square’s iOS teams. UI Systems’ accessibility squad also supports accessibility needs across Square’s products and surfaces.
Why? Ensuring a consistent experience across products at scale is hard. At Square, we value great and consistent design – UI Systems is here to ensure that Square’s customers and Square engineers alike have a delightful and consistent experience when working with, or working on our products – no matter who built them.
Our design system is built with Blueprint and Listable, our open source declarative UI frameworks. We also heavily leverage Square’s Workflow state management framework. In 2024, we’re working on a ground-up rebuild of the design system in SwiftUI! We’re really excited to offer SwiftUI to engineers at Square, and believe that this will be one of the largest deployments of SwiftUI in the industry – both in terms of the scale of the design system, and the scale of Square’s products.
As an engineer on the UI Systems team, you’ll be expected to partner closely with our design team to inform and deliver components and tools that help Square’s product engineers work faster, while ensuring a quality experience for Square’s sellers. You’ll also function as a translator of sorts – identifying needs and missing pieces and bringing them to UI Systems to push the entire design system forward. We also work closely with peer engineering teams like Mobile Foundation and Mobile Performance & Reliability, ensuring a reliable, performant and observable toolkit across all layers of the stack.
As the staff engineer and the team technical lead for UI Systems iOS, you’ll work closely with UI Systems leads, and leads across Square to set technical direction, set team priorities, and overall evangelize the work of UI Systems. Alongside your manager, you’ll also be responsible for career coaching and technical mentorship of your UI Systems iOS peers.
Finally, you will also be expected to build and maintain relationships with other senior mobile engineers, both within our team, and across all of our customer and peer teams to stay ahead of potential issues and understand upcoming needs. A key part of UI Systems’ job is to understand the current state of mobile development at Square, empathizing with the pain points of our customer teams, and working across platform teams to solve these issues – our team works with others to “get to yes” – we want to be an enabler, not a blocker.
You Will:
- Build the core UI frameworks and design tooling needed to deploy, maintain, and test our design system at scale (we have 1300+ screens across our products).
Work closely with designers on UI systems, and across Square, to build a scalable design system for our mobile apps. This includes everything from simple UI elements like buttons up to custom navigation stacks and hierarchies and whatever is needed between.
Work with all engineers on UI systems across Android, iOS, and web to ensure we’re building in a consistent and cohesive way on all three platforms. We’re aiming for consistency in APIs across platforms when possible.
Embed with Square’s product teams to evangelize and adopt our design system, core frameworks, and design tools.
Provide courteous, timely support to product engineers building with the design system, answering their questions and building missing pieces to unblock and support their needs.
Qualifications
You Have:
8+ years iOS development experience, deep UIKit experience is a must.
Some SwiftUI experience or knowledge is expected.
Experience with, understanding of, and passion for UI design principles.
Experience building design systems or UI frameworks at medium to large scale.
Experience building relationships across design and engineering.
Experience leading through influence across engineers.
Experience as a technical lead or manager for a small to medium sized team.
Note: We are a process-light team – you must be independent, have a strong bias towards action, and be a self-starter. We use processes to help us, not to constrain us
