Product Designer, Design Systems

Speak • San Francisco, CA

10d • $160,000 - $260,000

About The Position

Speak is seeking a seasoned Product Designer to enhance the collaboration between design and engineering, focusing on building a world-class, agent-first design system. This role requires a systems thinker with a high degree of craft and collaboration skills. The designer will work closely with dedicated engineers to implement the design system across product surfaces, owning the design quality, semantics, and product usefulness. Engineering will manage the technical architecture and implementation, with close collaboration on component APIs, constraints, and adoption. The scope includes work across iOS, Android, and web, with a mobile-first approach, ensuring components and patterns translate cleanly to web as those surfaces expand. This role specifically focuses on product surfaces, not the marketing site.

Requirements

• 6+ years in product design with significant experience in design systems built on tokens, component APIs, and a single source of truth in code.
• Experience building a design system, contributing meaningfully to components, patterns, tokens, governance, and adoption.
• Systems thinking ability; preference for building reusable solutions over single features.
• Defensible design taste with the ability to articulate design choices (spacing, motion, interaction states) for Speak's context.
• Clear communication skills and cross-functional drive, capable of writing rules and collaborating across teams for adoption.
• Autonomy and end-to-end ownership, thriving with minimal scaffolding and driving from problem identification to shipped and adopted solutions.
• Fluency with AI in craft, including building repeatable ways of working with AI/agents and explaining changes.
• Accessibility and scale mindset, considering system robustness across mobile and web as it grows.

Nice To Haves

• Comfort building or modifying components in code (Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin/Jetpack Compose, or web).
• Experience shipping consumer-scale mobile products across multiple markets/locales.
• Experience building a design system that engineers actively used and that outlasted the team's involvement.
• A strong point of view on the future of design-to-code and agent workflows.
• Experience in language learning, education, or domains where cross-cultural nuance is critical to product success.

Responsibilities

• Improve the Design ↔ Engineering workflow by treating the seams between functions as a design problem, focusing on shared language, reducing re-made decisions, clearer handoffs, and faster shipping.
• Own component craft and system coherence, setting the quality bar for components and patterns, and pressure-testing them through building and prototyping, ideally with agents.
• Develop the semantic layer for scalability, including component naming, usage rules, and decision guidance to make the right choice the easy choice for designers, engineers, and agents.
• Drive adoption across the design organization by creating standards and workflows that make using the design system the default.
• Own usage documentation and quality check workflows, including AI-assisted checks for consistency, accessibility, and component usage, to ensure quality is hands-off and reliable.
• Build and evolve necessary components, prioritizing high-leverage gaps, pressure-testing them in real product work, and turning repeated decisions into durable patterns.
• Establish agent-first systems and workflows with rules and semantics to help humans and agents use the system correctly without relying on tribal knowledge.
• Set the operating cadence with design and engineering, establishing a contribution/review rhythm to maintain system coherence and adoption.

Benefits

• Opportunity to do life's work with a fantastic, tight-knit team.
• Join at a pivotal time with rapid growth, Series C funding, and product-market fit.
• Potential for a single individual to significantly impact the company's direction.
• Focus on craft and daily growth for every team member.
• Enjoy working with respected and admired colleagues.
• Global exposure with operations in over 40 countries and offices in San Francisco, Ljubljana, Seoul, and Tokyo.
• Opportunity to talk to users in various regions and potential for travel.
• Impact people's lives by helping millions achieve their language learning goals.
• Commitment to diversity and equal opportunity employment.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed