Senior Product Designer, Design Foundations

The New York Times • New York, NY

7d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Games team at the New York Times — the group behind Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, the Daily Crossword, and more — is looking for a Senior Product Designer to establish and evolve design foundations and systems across web and app experiences, creating shared reusable interface patterns, and find opportunities for consistency and quality, as well as executing designs of complex features.
In this role you will collaborate with multiple teams and use your skills in UX, interaction, and visual design to explore solutions that work across games and game surfaces, align with brand, and meet standards for accessibility. You'll work closely with our Games Web Platform Product Manager and Engineering partners to understand technical constraints in a legacy codebase, drive convergence on shared components and tokens, and improve the design-to-engineering handoff. You'll articulate design rationale and present your work to stakeholders across different teams and disciplines to ensure the effectiveness of the design system that brings clarity, consistency, and efficiency.
We're looking for someone who obsesses over the details, brings rigor to defining design standards and shared systems, and proactively elevates quality and accessibility across the organization. At The Times, Senior Product Designers are trusted team contributors with deepening expertise in a particular skill set. You'll design and deliver work that helps your team meet its goals. You'll use your craft and product thinking skills to bring clarity, sophistication, and playful experiences to our audience.
This is a hybrid role based in our New York City office.

Requirements

• 4+ years of relevant experience working within cross-functional teams.
• 2+ years experience working directly on design systems or platform/foundations work (components, tokens, patterns, or similar).
• A portfolio of work that showcases your thought process along with finished design work.
• Experience collaborating with engineers to implement design systems or component libraries.
• Demonstrated experience building, maintaining, and applying design systems in collaboration with engineering.
• Fluent in UX design best practices and usability principles that responsively scale across mobile and web platforms.
• Working knowledge of accessibility and inclusive design, especially as it applies to systems work (typography scales, contrast, motion, and semantics).
• You're proficient in Figma or equivalent software.
• You understand the constraints and opportunities of technologies used to build modern digital experiences.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading or contributing to a design system that spans both web and native app surfaces.
• Experience shaping team design practices (e.g., crits, documentation, templates) to move an organization toward more responsive, system-first work.
• Experience collaborating on foundational refactors with platform or infrastructure teams (for example, typography or color system overhauls, or migrations to new component libraries).
• Comfort working with engineers and understanding implementation tradeoffs – codified design intent through design tokens, component APIs, and reading through specs.
• Experience documenting and delivering UI screens and specifications to engineers.
• Interaction design skills that allow you to communicate your intent.
• Experience facilitating discovery sessions with stakeholders and cross-functional team members.
• Advanced visual design skills, including typography, hierarchy, and layout.
• Enthusiastic about the big picture and the smallest micro-interactions.
• Enthusiasm for puzzle games and the mission of The New York Times.

Responsibilities

• Co-own the platform-focused design systems roadmap with the Games Web & App Platform PM and engineering leads, identifying where foundational work (tokens, components, typography, layout) unlocks future product velocity.
• Contribute to and maintain Figma libraries and engineering documentation that map cleanly to our implemented component libraries, ensuring designers and engineers work from the same source of truth.
• Audit existing web and app experiences and component libraries to identify opportunities for consolidation, improvement, and systemization.
• Define and monitor design system health and adoption, identifying areas where teams may need guidance or additional support.
• Champion responsive, system-first design practices across the Games mission.
• Provide guidance to designers using the system, including critiques, pairing, and improving documentation so the system remains clear and useful across different games and surfaces.
• Develop information architecture for complex user journeys and create functional prototypes of proposed UX solutions.
• Anticipate and solve for different entry points, exit points, system states, and user states in proposed interactions.
• Produce production-ready design deliverables and partner with engineers to ensure accurate implementation.
• Be the standard-bearer for design quality across Games surfaces and system contributions.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Benefits

• Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.

What This Job Offers

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