Product Design Lead - Design Systems

Pebl•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

Design systems are infrastructure. They determine how fast teams move, how consistent the product feels, and how much trust users place in every interaction. We're looking for a designer who understands this deeply — someone who brings both systems-level thinking and exceptional craft to the work. In this role, you'll own and evolve our design system end-to-end: the component library, the token architecture, the documentation, and the workflows that connect design to production. You'll work in close partnership with engineering and product to ensure the system scales across web and mobile surfaces — and that it stays useful, adoptable, and ahead of the curve as our product and tooling landscape evolves. This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role. You'll shape the shared language that every product team works from, and influence how designers and engineers across the org build together.

Requirements

7+ years of product design experience, with at least 3 years owning or significantly contributing to a design system at a product company
An outstanding portfolio demonstrating systems-level thinking, component craft, and real impact at scale
Extraordinary visual design taste — a rigorous, opinionated eye for typography, color, spacing, and interaction quality that raises the bar across every surface
Expert-level Figma skills: component architecture, variables, tokens, auto-layout, and the discipline to keep a shared library production-aligned
Comfort working across the design-to-code workflow — you know your way around design tokens, Storybook, and GitHub, and can collaborate closely with engineers on implementation
Strong understanding of front-end fundamentals (HTML, CSS, React or equivalent) and how design decisions translate into code
Knowledge of accessibility standards and a commitment to inclusive design baked into every component by default
Strong written communication skills — you write documentation that is clear, opinionated, and easy to act on
Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives and influencing senior stakeholders on system strategy and investment

Nice To Haves

Experience integrating AI tools into design and development workflows — AI-assisted prototyping, automated component generation, design-to-code pipelines
Background building or contributing to open-source design systems
Familiarity with design-to-code automation tools and AI-driven product development workflows
External thought leadership through writing, speaking, or open-source contributions in the design systems space
Experience in enterprise SaaS, fintech, or other complex, data-dense product environments

Responsibilities

Own the architecture, strategy, and evolution of the design system — components, tokens, patterns, and documentation — across web and mobile surfaces
Design and ship production-ready components with a high bar for craft: well-defined states, variants, interaction models, responsiveness, and accessibility baked in from the start
Partner closely with frontend engineering to ensure system decisions translate cleanly into code — with shared ownership of quality, parity, and maintainability
Create clear, opinionated documentation and usage guidance: best practices, anti-patterns, decision frameworks, and contribution standards that teams can act on immediately
Build and maintain governance models that balance system integrity with the speed product teams need
Conduct regular audits to identify inconsistencies, gaps, and opportunities to improve component coverage and design-to-code parity
Lead the evaluation and integration of AI-powered design tooling — including Figma AI, MCP integrations, StoryBook MCP and generative workflows — into how the system is built and consumed
Anticipate shifts in the product, platform, and tooling landscape, and evolve the system proactively towards an agentic workflow.