Principal Design Systems Designer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Conduct an audit of the current product UI and existing design artifacts to pinpoint significant opportunities for standardization, consolidation, and reduction of inconsistencies.

• Establish the information architecture of the system, including naming conventions, taxonomy, component hierarchy, and documentation structure, to ensure that both humans and AI agents can effectively locate, reason about, and accurately apply the appropriate primitives.

• Collaborate with design, engineering, and leadership to formulate a detailed, step-by-step plan that prioritizes various aspects of this initiative, balancing long-term scalability with immediate product requirements.

• Develop and implement a scalable token strategy encompassing color, typography, spacing, elevation, and motion, alongside a pipeline that synchronizes Figma variables, code tokens, and Storybook.

• Work in partnership with Front-End engineers to translate the system into reusable, well-architected components with clearly defined APIs, states, and built-in accessibility features.

• Manage the entire component lifecycle: versioning, release notes, deprecations, and handoffs.

• Design a lightweight, builder-friendly contribution process, enabling designers, engineers, and PMs to propose, review, and integrate into the system without imposing a heavy governance burden.

• Generate documentation that is genuinely useful for users (and agents): guidelines, do's and don'ts, usage rationales, and decision records, organized to be machine-readable as well as human-readable.

• Promote pragmatic adoption by starting where it has the greatest impact, shipping in iterations, and building credibility through visible product outcomes.

• Define the role of AI agents in auditing, tagging, and maintaining the system's structure, along with identifying appropriate human review checkpoints (naming decisions, deprecations, introductions of new patterns).

• Shape the pipeline that transforms a Figma frame or a PM's prompt through Cursor / Claude Code into Storybook-validated components, including review checkpoints that ensure quality, accessibility, and brand integrity are maintained.

• Ensure that the system is comprehensible to agents by documenting, naming, and structuring components, tokens, and patterns so that when a designer or PM instructs an agent to "build the post-intent screen," the agent selects the correct primitives to deliver a shippable output—rather than something needing reconstruction.

• Define success metrics and track relevant signals: adoption rates, UI consistency, design/dev cycle times, accessibility enhancements, and the quality of AI-generated outputs against the system.

• Collaborate with Research and Data as needed to link system modifications to product outcomes, including quality, user confidence, and conversion efficiency.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in owning a design system from inception to execution at a product company, including the organizational aspects necessary for its adoption—not just the design artifacts.

• Extensive knowledge of design-to-code integration: token pipelines, component APIs, versioning, and practical synchronization of design and code.

• Demonstrated success in fostering adoption through pragmatic and builder-friendly processes, rather than cumbersome governance.

• Strong familiarity with contemporary front-end concepts (tokens, components, states, responsive behavior) and a willingness to collaborate closely with engineers on trade-offs.

• Experience in setting accessibility standards and delivering accessible components in line with WCAG-informed practices and inclusive design thinking.

• Genuine interest and practical experience with AI-assisted design and development workflows; familiarity with tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or similar, along with a perspective on the necessary human involvement.

• Ability to provide direction for peers and partner teams, making informed decisions on ambiguous trade-offs (governance vs. speed, system purity vs. product reality, human review vs. agent autonomy) and supporting these decisions with evidence.

• Capability to excel in ambiguous situations and create structure where it is lacking—pragmatic, opinionated, and iterative.

• Effective communicator who can align diverse stakeholders and influence without formal authority.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• 401(k) matching

• Flexible work hours

• Paid time off

• Remote work options