Overview

Instacart’s Design Systems & Foundations team builds the shared components, tokens, and guidance that power customer, shopper, retailer, and internal tools at scale. We’re looking for a design-first, technically fluent product designer to lead the evolution of our design system as a product—raising quality, usability, scalability, and adoption across multiple product surfaces.

In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineering and design technologists to ensure design-to-code fidelity, integrate guidance directly inside design and development workflows, and shape a durable “source of truth” that can power automation, guardrails, and AI-assisted workflows. You’ll collaborate with an 8-person foundations team and cross-functional partners to unlock velocity and consistency for product teams serving millions of customers.

About the Job

• Own and drive the design system roadmap—prioritizing by product needs, system health, and adoption friction—while aligning stakeholders on a clear, forward-looking vision.
• Define and evolve system UX: components, patterns, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults that scale across products and platforms.
• Lead token strategy end to end (primitive and semantic), including theming, density, and extensibility, and partner with engineering to maintain consistent component APIs.
• Establish strong governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans to reduce system drift.
• Create implementation-aware specs with edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria; collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Figma libraries, Storybook) to ensure design-to-code fidelity.
• Build design enablement in context—linting rules, templates, and plugin experiences—supported by a structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, examples) that powers automation and AI-assisted support.
• Use AI tools intentionally to streamline audits, consistency checks, migrations, and spec generation; contribute to AI-assisted workflows that help teams adopt changes safely.
• Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in product design (or equivalent), including shipping and maintaining a design system adopted by multiple product teams.
• Portfolio showcasing design systems mastery (components, patterns, tokens, governance) and cross-platform consistency; portfolio link required.
• Technical fluency collaborating in component-based workflows (e.g., Figma component libraries and Storybook or equivalent) with a strong understanding of how implementation constraints shape UX.
• Hands-on experience with token pipelines and tooling (e.g., CSS variables, semantic token architectures) and writing implementation-aware specs with acceptance criteria.
• Proven accessibility competency applied to systems (e.g., WCAG 2.1 AA) with accessible defaults and patterns.
• Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve delivery speed and quality for design systems (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation).
• Experience driving system adoption through metrics, deprecation/migration programs, and cross-functional enablement.
• Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI-assisted coding and design environments (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and building Figma plugins or linting/guardrail tooling.
• Track record implementing scalable theming, density, and semantic token strategies across multiple products or platforms.
• Experience facilitating design sprints, co-creation workshops, or component governance reviews with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Data fluency leveraging telemetry, adoption metrics, and experiments to inform system roadmap and deprecation strategies.
• Familiarity with versioned monorepos or multi-package design system releases, including change management and migration planning.

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