Staff Software Engineer, Design Systems

Help reinvent how housing gets designed, permitted, and built in America.

Cedar is building the operating system for urban housing delivery. We combine architectural expertise with software, automation, and data systems to dramatically accelerate how projects move from land acquisition to approved designs and construction. The result: faster timelines, higher quality, lower risk, and more housing in the cities that need it most.

Our team blends architects, engineers, and product builders. We design real buildings — and we build the software systems that make great architecture scalable.

The Role

You’ll own Composer end-to-end. Composer is Cedar’s design tooling platform: the system our architects use to create, extend, and reuse the building blocks of real projects. It spans parametric modeling, data architecture, and the authoring experience, and it will grow over the coming quarters as new capabilities come online.

This is a staff-level ownership role, not a feature role. You’ll set Composer’s technical direction, own its architecture and quality bar, and take over its long-term roadmap from our CTO. You’ll work directly with the architects who use the tools every day, and you’ll help build the team that carries the work forward.

What You’ll Own

The platform

• Technical leadership across Composer, including its geometric and parametric modeling, data models, and storage

• A data architecture built to evolve, with versioning, migrations, and stable contracts with the systems and teams that depend on it

• A coherent product as it grows, so new capabilities feel like one tool rather than several

The designer experience

• Make Composer something architects use directly and quickly, without engineering in the loop

• Tighten the feedback loop between authoring something and seeing the result

• Measure where the workflow creates friction, and prioritize by impact rather than by what’s interesting to build

• Understand the design tools our architects use today well enough to know what they give up when work moves into Composer

Technical leadership

• Write specs, contracts, and decision records that others can execute against without ambiguity

• Own the technical roadmap: turn product needs into a clear plan and defend it in planning

• Represent Composer in cross-team technical decisions

• Raise architectural disagreements early and in writing

• Grow into leading the Composer team, starting with hiring input and technical screens and adding direct reports as the work warrants

What Success Looks Like

• Composer’s work keeps moving without the CTO in the loop. You keep the product and project on track, and execution stays technically sound with only routine check-ins.

• Architects use Composer on real projects and get faster because of it. They stop waiting on engineering.

• There’s a roadmap we can resource against. We plan and staff ahead of the work instead of laying tracks in front of the train.

• Designers bring their technical questions to you first.

• You’ve talked us out of something. Your first 90 days should include at least one thing we didn’t build because of you.

Your First 90 Days

The first month is about context: shipping something real and forming your own view of where the current system gets in designers’ way. The second month is about building: strengthening the foundations and delivering a workflow designers prefer to the one it replaced. By the third month, you own the technical roadmap, designers can work in Composer without engineering support, and you’re consulted before architecture decisions are made, not after.

Who You Are

• A systems thinker with strong engineering judgment and a clear sense of what not to build

• Comfortable taking on ambiguous problems and driving them to clarity in writing, with reasoning others can challenge

• Someone who breaks big problems into pieces that ship, cuts scope when it makes sense, and builds on each win

• Motivated by making the people closest to the problem faster, not by building interesting things for their own sake

• Holds a high bar for correctness and simplicity: clean boundaries, few dependencies, schema-first design, and predictable output

• Interested in growing into team leadership, raising the output of everyone around you and eventually building the team

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including staff-level or equivalent ownership of a core system (flexible for exceptional candidates)

• Strong proficiency in Rust, or deep systems experience in a comparable language and the ability to ramp up quickly

• Experience designing data models, schemas, and persistence layers for versioned, evolving content, including migrations and contracts with downstream consumers

• Experience with geometric modeling, computational geometry, or parametric design systems

• Familiarity with web 3D rendering (Three.js, WebGPU, or similar)

• A track record of writing specs, contracts, and decision records that other engineers execute against

• Fluency in AI-native software development. That means more than familiarity with tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor: you know how to use agents effectively across planning, implementation, review, testing, and iteration

• Experience setting technical direction for other engineers through specs, code review, and mentorship

Nice to Have

• Experience with AEC software, BIM tools, or CAD systems

• Working familiarity with Rhino/Grasshopper or similar parametric design tools

• Experience building authoring tools, design systems, or developer platforms used directly by non-engineers

• Background in intermediate representations, compilers, or toolchains for structured content

• Exposure to USD, Unreal, or similar 3D interchange and rendering pipelines

• Familiarity with rule engines or constraint-solving systems

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary

• Meaningful equity

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage

• The chance to own a foundational system early and build the team around it