Senior Product Designer II role on Instacart's Design Systems & Foundations team, an 8-person team building shared components, tokens and guidance powering customer, shopper, retailer and internal tools. Owns the design system as a product, driving quality, usability, scalability and adoption across surfaces.
What you'll do
- Own and drive the design system roadmap, prioritising by product needs, system health and adoption friction
- Define and evolve system UX: components, patterns, interaction states, responsive behaviour, motion, accessibility defaults
- Lead token strategy end to end, including theming, density and extensibility
- Partner with engineering to maintain consistent component APIs
- Establish governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, migration plans
- Create implementation-aware specs with edge cases, constraints, usage guidance and acceptance criteria
- Collaborate in component-based workflows to ensure design-to-code fidelity
- Build design enablement in context: linting rules, templates and plugin experiences
- Support a structured knowledge model that powers automation and AI-assisted support
- Use AI tools to streamline audits, consistency checks, migrations and spec generation
- Contribute to AI-assisted workflows that help teams adopt changes safely
- Measure adoption and impact and identify workflow friction
- Execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency and accelerate system evolution
What we're looking for
- 6+ years of product design experience or equivalent
- Experience shipping and maintaining a design system adopted by multiple product teams
- Portfolio showcasing design systems mastery: components, patterns, tokens, governance
- Portfolio link required
- Cross-platform consistency experience
- Technical fluency with component-based workflows (e.g. Figma libraries, Storybook)
- Strong understanding of how implementation constraints shape UX
- Hands-on experience with token pipelines and tooling (e.g. CSS variables, semantic token architectures)
- Experience writing implementation-aware specs with acceptance criteria
- Proven accessibility competency applied to systems (e.g. WCAG 2.1 AA)
- Experience creating accessible defaults and patterns
- Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve design systems delivery speed and quality
- Experience driving system adoption through metrics
- Experience with deprecation/migration programs
- Experience with cross-functional enablement
- Bachelor's degree in Design, HCI or related field, or equivalent practical experience
Nice to have
- Experience with AI-assisted coding and design environments (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code)
- Experience building Figma plugins or linting/guardrail tooling
- Track record implementing scalable theming, density and semantic token strategies across products or platforms
- Experience facilitating design sprints, co-creation workshops or component governance reviews
- Data fluency leveraging telemetry, adoption metrics and experiments to inform roadmap and deprecation strategies
- Familiarity with versioned monorepos or multi-package design system releases
- Experience with change management and migration planning
Good to know
- Role is remote
- Flex First policy: choose to work from home, office or elsewhere