Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out.

Headquartered in the U.S., Acquia is positioned as a market leader by the analyst community and is listed as one of the world’s top software companies by The Software Report. We are Acquia. We are a global company with employees located in more than 30 countries, and we’re building for the future. We want you to be a part of it!

The opportunity

Help us define what AI-era marketing sites look like.

At Acquia, we power the digital experiences of the world's most ambitious brands through Drupal and our suite of digital experience products. Our own site, Acquia.com, is where that story lives — and it's about to change in a big way. AI is rewriting how people discover, explore, and decide on B2B software, and we want a designer who is excited to shape what that looks like in the open.

This is not a "make the page pretty" role. It's a craft-led, system-minded, build-it-yourself role for a senior designer who wants real ownership of a flagship B2B web property and a real seat at the table as we redesign the site for an AI-first audience.

What you'll own

Acquia.com — craft, brand, and creative range

You'll set the visual and experiential bar for Acquia.com. We want bolder, more playful, more confident work than a typical B2B site. You'll translate brand and product positioning into web experiences that make Acquia feel as ambitious as the brands we serve, and partner closely with our Brand & Creative team to keep identity tight while pushing the web expression forward.

A modern, component-based design system

You'll co-own our web design system alongside Brand & Creative. We're moving toward a Tailwind + React component foundation built on top of Drupal. You'll define and document the components, patterns, and tokens, hold the line on consistency and accessibility, and make the system something Brand, Marketing, and Dev all want to build with.

AI-era web design

Roughly 40% of this role is forward-looking AI design work. You'll lead how Acquia.com adopts AI-generated and AI-assisted surfaces — personalized hero treatments, dynamic copy patterns, content generated against guardrails — and define the design language for what is generated, how it's signaled to the visitor, and how we keep quality high. You'll also lead the team's adoption of AI-assisted design and build tools (Figma AI, v0, Cursor, Claude, Lovable, and what comes next), turning them into a real velocity advantage instead of a novelty.

Design and build

You'll design and ship. We want a designer who can take a concept from sketch to live page without long handoff loops — Tailwind and React fluency, fluent in modern CMS authoring, able to reach into custom HTML/CSS and lightweight JS where the system falls short. You won't be the only person who can ship code, but you'll be the designer who can.

End-to-end ownership

You'll own the full arc — the brief, the concept, the system implications, the build, the measurement, and the iteration. We're looking for someone who comes with a point of view about where the site should go and the credibility to argue for it.

Who you'll work with

• Brand & Creative on identity, photography, illustration, and large campaigns
• Web development engineers on build, performance, and technical implementation
• Marketing campaigns and demand gen on landing pages, conversion experiences, and launches
• The wider ADX leadership team on the roadmap for Acquia.com and our AI surface area

What success looks like in your first year

• Acquia.com visibly stands out from our B2B SaaS peers — measurably better engagement and conversion, and work the team is proud to point at
• The web design system is live, documented, adopted across Brand, Marketing, and Dev, and reduces friction on every new launch
• The team's design-to-ship velocity is meaningfully higher because of how you've integrated AI tooling — without dropping the quality bar

What we're looking for

• 5+ years designing for the web, with senior-level ownership of at least one complex site or property
• A portfolio that includes a shipped B2B SaaS or enterprise web project, a design system or substantial component library you helped build, and a point of view about where web design is heading
• Strong visual design instincts with creative range — illustration, motion, layout, type — and the confidence to push beyond the safe B2B template
• Working fluency with Tailwind and modern React component patterns, and willingness to write the code, not just spec it
• Comfort with Figma as a daily driver and with Adobe Creative Suite when the work calls for it
• Real accessibility chops — WCAG 2.1 AA as a default, not a checkbox at the end
• Curiosity and demonstrated experience with AI-assisted design and build workflows, and an opinion about how to use them well
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, fluent in English, comfortable presenting work to leadership and defending the choices behind it
• Self-directed: this is a remote role on a senior team, and we trust you to set the pace

Nice to have

• Direct experience with Drupal or other enterprise CMS platforms
• Background designing for AI-native or agentic experiences
• Front-end engineering experience beyond Tailwind/React (build tools, design tokens, component testing)
• A track record of evolving a brand's web expression — not just executing against an existing one

Our interview process

• Recruiter screen
• Hiring manager conversation
• Portfolio deep-dive with the ADX team
• Practical design exercise — focused on creative range, system thinking, and how you partner with AI tools, not just polished pixels
• Final round with cross-functional partners

We are an organization that embraces innovation and the potential of AI to enhance our processes and improve our work. We are always looking for individuals who are open to learning new technologies and collaborating with AI tools to achieve our goals.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military and veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by local law, regulation, or ordinance.

Why You'll Love This Role: 

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer Contractor for the Writing product team. This is a hands-on role on a small, full-stack team building AI-powered learning experiences. You'll ship across the product end-to-end: frontend, backend, data, and the LLM-driven services that sit behind our assessment features.

We work AI-native. Coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates, and we expect senior engineers to do more than use them. The strongest people on the team invest in the harness itself: writing skills, hooks, and custom workflows that make the next person faster.

What We're Looking For:

A Senior Individual Contributor with a high agency. Someone who:

• Owns the full lifecycle. Takes a problem from vague ask to shipped, monitored, and stable in production. Comfortable shaping scope without heavy PM guidance.
• Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production - in their own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked.
• Picks up slack outside their lane. Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives an unowned problem when priorities shift.
• Builds in the AI-native space with judgment. Uses agents as a daily driver, knows their failure modes, and pushes the team's practice forward - not just their own.
• Drives delivery. Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, communicates trade-offs clearly to engineering and product partners.

Core Responsibilities

• Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact.
• Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals.
• Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations.
• Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens.
• Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning.

Required Experience

• 5+ years building production web applications, with a strong full-stack range (modern React/TypeScript frontends and a typed or Pythonic backend).
• Track record of owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and shipping with measurable impact.
• Substantive code review history - examples of catching architectural issues.
• Active daily use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) with a clear point of view on where they help, where they hurt, and how to keep their output reviewable.
• Comfort with production debugging across the stack: traces, logs, profiling, the unglamorous parts.
• Strong async written communication: clear PR descriptions, sharp Slack, sharp specs.

Strong Plus

• Experience extending or building on agentic developer tooling (custom agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers, eval harnesses).
• Background in rich text editing, document collaboration, or LLM-backed product features.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits.

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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