Sr Director, Design Systems, AI Enablement

Gap Inc.•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As a senior leader within our Experience Design organization, you will shape the future of Gap Inc.’s customer, associate and product experiences through scale, impact, and innovation. As one of the world’s leading multi-brand retailers, we have the reach and responsibility to set the standard for modern, connected, and intelligent digital experiences. The Sr. Director, Design System and AI Enablement will be directly responsible for Gap Inc.’s design system, the shared foundation that powers how our brands and technology partners design, build, and deliver experiences. You will also lead the integration of AI-driven tools and workflows into the design practice, ensuring our teams work faster, smarter, and more creatively at scale with meaningful/measurable outcomes. In this role, you will unify and evolve a multi-brand design system that currently spans consumer, enterprise, and mobile platforms. You will establish a machine-readable framework powered by APIs and design tokens that connects brand expression, accessibility, and performance across every platform and channel. The system must be composable and extensible, supporting four distinct brands while maintaining the consistency and quality that accelerates engineering delivery. Beyond the design system, you will lead AI enablement for the Experience Design practice. You will partner with the office of AI, Product Management and Engineering to define the strategy for AI-assisted design workflows, from prototype generation and design-to-code automation to AI-powered testing and content adaptation. You will evaluate, adopt, and govern AI tools that enhance how teams create, iterate, and deliver. This includes building the bridge between design tooling (Figma) and engineering workflows, ensuring seamless handoff, traceability, and automation across the pipeline. This role is central to the Experience Design organization’s mission to deliver unified, adaptive, and personalized brand experiences. The Sr. Director, Design System and AI Enablement ensures that every digital interaction across Gap Inc. is built on a consistent, intelligent, and reusable design foundation, and that AI amplifies the capability of every designer, researcher, and product partner in the organization.

Requirements

Extensive experience in UX design, systems architecture, and design operations, with a focus on enterprise-scale design systems serving multiple brands or product lines.
Deep technical fluency bridging design, engineering, and technical platforms through systems architecture, design tokens, component lifecycle management, and design-to-code automation.
Proven record of unifying fragmented design systems into coherent, governed foundations. You have navigated the organizational and technical complexity of multi-platform, multi-brand system convergence.
Forward-looking perspective on AI in design practice. You understand how AI tools (generative design, design-to-code, automated testing, content adaptation) enhance team capability and you can separate signal from hype.
Strong cross-functional partnership skills. You have co-owned design systems with engineering, establishing shared governance, contribution models, and quality standards.
Passionate about accessibility as a system property, not an audit finding. You build accessibility into foundations so it is the default, not the exception.
Experience managing hybrid or managed service teams. You know how to maintain quality and craft standards while scaling through external partners.
Skilled at measuring system maturity and communicating impact to executive stakeholders. You connect design system adoption to delivery velocity, quality, and business outcomes.
A natural talent builder who develops people, grows cross-functional capability, and nurtures a high-performing design systems culture. You know what great looks like, and you elevate the craft, culture, and capability of everyone around you to achieve it.

Responsibilities

Architect and lead a modern, machine-readable design system that supports multi-brand experiences across consumer, enterprise, and mobile platforms.
Unify existing system variants into a single, governed foundation.
Define governance, standards, and contribution models for design tokens, components, patterns, and brand-specific theming. Balance central standards with the flexibility each brand needs to express itself.
Lead the AI enablement strategy for the Experience Design practice. Evaluate, adopt, and govern AI tools and workflows that accelerate design, prototyping, testing, and delivery.
Build the bridge between design and engineering. Partner with front-end engineering leadership to establish seamless handoff, automated validation, and design-to-code pipelines. Ensure the design system is co-owned across design, product, and engineering.
Champion accessibility, inclusivity, and performance as core principles of every design system deliverable. Ensure accessibility is built into the system, not audited after the fact.
Empower internal users, including designers, product managers, and engineers, with a unified, efficient, and scalable system that accelerates collaboration and delivery.
Lead CMS foundation strategy, ensuring content management components align with the design system and support modular, brand-differentiated content delivery.
Inspire, mentor, and grow a high-performing design systems, CMS, and AI enablement team. Manage both Gap FTE and managed service partners.
Measure and improve design system maturity and AI tool adoption. Connect the system’s evolution to business and operational impact, including delivery velocity, quality, accessibility compliance, and team productivity.
Shape the future of design at Gap Inc. by embedding AI-assisted creation, intelligent adaptation, and intent-based design into our systems and processes.