Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead

Role overview Establish and lead a design systems function that helps designers, engineers, and AI agents build polished, consistent product experiences as the organization and product grow. The role begins with hands-on strategy and implementation, including system architecture, components, guidance, and quality standards, then expands into hiring and team leadership.

Responsibilities - Set the system’s direction by deciding what to preserve, improve, simplify, or replace based on user and product needs. - Build the foundations directly: establish architecture, ship components, write guidance, and set standards for visual and interaction quality. - Make design guidance accessible to AI agents through machine-readable documentation, exposed rules and tokens, and an architecture that preserves brand and accessibility standards. - Define ways to evaluate system quality, including repeatable checks of AI-generated work against real tasks and design expectations. - Partner with product teams to grow adoption, turn recurring questions into system improvements, and balance flexibility, consistency, performance, and usability. - As the function grows, hire and develop the team, set priorities, and maintain a high craft bar.

Requirements - A track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering, with interest in building a function from the ground up. - Exceptional visual and interaction design skills, including attention to hierarchy, typography, responsive behavior, motion, accessibility, and less common interface states. - Experience creating systems other teams adopt, with evidence that the work improves both delivery speed and product quality. - Strong technical fluency: ability to prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture, and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers. - Hands-on use of AI in design work and a considered approach to making systems understandable and useful to AI tools. - Ability to make decisions in ambiguity, give clear feedback, and sustain momentum while maintaining quality.

Nice to have Experience leading designers or design engineers; building developer tools or infrastructure products; AI-ready design systems, agent access, or output evaluation; major system migrations; cross-platform systems; or early-stage companies.

Benefits and work setup Benefits include four weeks of paid vacation, 14 weeks of paid parental leave, employer-paid medical coverage and most dental and vision coverage, disability and life insurance, a 401(k), wellness and connectivity stipends, commuter or home-office support, and learning resources. New visa sponsorship is generally unavailable; transfers may be considered with business approval.