Senior Product Designer II - Design Systems

Instacart

3h•Remote

About The Position

We're transforming the grocery industry At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table. Instacart is a Flex First team There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work. Overview We’re looking for a design-first Design Systems lead with a technical lean. You’ll own the design system as a product, its quality, usability, scalability, and adoption, while partnering closely with engineering and design technologists to ensure the system is implemented cleanly in code and integrated into real workflows. We’re optimizing for a future where guidance is delivered in context (inside design and dev workflows) rather than relying on long doc pages that few people read. You’ll help shape the system’s “source of truth” so it can power tooling, checks, and AI-assisted workflows.

Requirements

6+ years in product design (or equivalent) with proven experience shipping and maintaining a design system used by multiple teams.
Strong design fundamentals: interaction design, visual systems, hierarchy, and responsive patterns.
Design systems mastery: components, patterns, tokens, governance, adoption, systems-thinking, documentation, and cross-platform consistency.
Technical fluency: able to collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Storybook or equivalent) and understand how implementation constraints shape UX.
Strong accessibility competency applied to systems (WCAG compliance, etc).
Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve speed and quality (not just ideation, real workflow impact).
Experience with token pipelines (CSS variables, semantic token architectures, token tooling).
Experience driving adoption through metrics, migrations, and enablement programs.
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.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with AI‑assisted coding environments such as Cursor and Claude Code.
Strong foundation in human-centered design thinking methodologies
Proven ability to facilitate design sprints and collaborative ideation sessions
Proven ability to empathize and balance needs of multiple (internal and external) users, define problems, ideate solutions, prototype concepts, and test iteratively
Proven track record of applying design and systems thinking frameworks to drive innovation and solve challenging problems

Responsibilities

Drive the design system roadmap: prioritize based on product needs, system health, and adoption friction.
Demonstrated ability to set a clear, forward‑looking vision for design system evolution and drive stakeholder alignment.
Define and evolve component and pattern UX: anatomy, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults.
Lead token strategy (primitive + semantic): semantics, theming, density, and scalable extensibility across products.
Establish and maintain system governance: contribution standards, quality bar, review process, versioning, deprecations, and migration plans.
Partner with design technologists, engineers and product design teams to ensure design-to-code fidelity, consistent component APIs, and minimal system drift.
Ensure high-quality standards of implementation-aware specs (not just visuals): edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria.
Collaborate with Design Technologists to translate system guidance into in-tool guardrails (linting, templates, plugin experiences).
Help define the system’s structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, do/don’t, examples) so it can power automation and AI-assisted support.
Identify design enablement workflow opportunities and prioritize enablement opportunities that reduce rework and raise consistency.
Establish strong governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans to reduce system drift.
Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution.
Use AI tools intentionally to streamline system work (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation, change summaries).
Contribute to AI-assisted workflows that reduce system toil and help teams adopt changes safely.
Proactive mindset learning and working with AI-prototyping tools and design enablement processes.