Principal Product Designer

DoorDash USA•Los Angeles, CA

1d•$208,800 - $307,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At DoorDash, design means creating experiences for those who order, prepare, and deliver. As a Designer, you will build impactful products that reach and influence users at a massive scale. You will collaborate closely with Engineering and Product Management, analyze data, and utilize LLM-powered tools alongside traditional design methods. If necessary, you will also develop new LLM-powered tools. This role operates under a hybrid model, requiring 1-2 days per week in one of our Design Hubs. You will be responsible for setting the technical direction for Design within your product area, prioritizing what gets built, and connecting multiple teams around shared platforms to ensure work is compounded rather than duplicated. You will tackle ambiguous problems, translating them into architectural decisions and usable systems. Your influence will stem from shipped prototypes and code rather than presentations. You will maintain a close connection to code and craft across multiple projects, ensuring your work moves key product metrics. Additionally, you will build and maintain design systems, component libraries, and AI-powered tooling, including prompt libraries, evaluation pipelines, and design-to-code workflows, ensuring their adoption through clear documentation and onboarding. You will uphold high standards for both design and code, delivering production-ready prototypes and identifying product opportunities. You will also mentor senior designers and managers, contribute to hiring, and foster an environment where design engineers can excel.

Requirements

You have a portfolio or repo of work that shows you can design and build at a high level, not just one or the other
You build in code as naturally as you design — React, TypeScript, or similar frameworks are tools you think in, not things you're learning; you reach for Cursor, Claude, or similar tools to move faster and build things you wouldn't attempt by hand
You've set direction across a product area before and your influence comes from what you ship, not what you present — people adopt your tools because they're good, not because you told them to
You care about leverage: you'd rather build a system that makes 20 people faster than ship one great feature yourself
You have a background in high-growth consumer tech, complex marketplace products, or platform/infrastructure teams where you built tools and systems adopted across multiple teams

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for Design across your product area — decide what gets built, in what order, and why; connect multiple teams around shared platforms so the work compounds instead of duplicating
Work on ambiguous problems and turn them into architecture decisions and working systems that teams actually use; earn trust with leadership not through decks, but through prototypes and shipped code that make your point for you
Stay close to the code and the craft across multiple projects at once — you're not just reviewing, you're building; the work you ship will move real metrics across the product area, not just the team you sit with
Build the design systems, component libraries, and AI-powered tooling that your product area runs on — prompt libraries, eval pipelines, design-to-code workflows — and make sure people actually use them by writing clear docs, onboarding teams, and iterating based on real feedback
Hold a high bar for both design and code — your prototypes should be production-ready, not throwaway; spot product opportunities that others miss and help the people around you get sharper at knowing what to build and why
Grow the team around you — mentor senior designers and managers, help close strong hires, and shape the kind of environment where design engineers do their best work