Sr. Product Designer II - Design Systems

Instacart

5d•$169,000 - $214,000•Remote

About The Position

Instacart’s Design Systems & Foundations team builds the shared components, tokens, and guidance that power customer, shopper, retailer, and internal tools at scale. We’re looking for a design-first, technically fluent product designer to lead the evolution of our design system as a product—raising quality, usability, scalability, and adoption across multiple product surfaces. In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineering and design technologists to ensure design-to-code fidelity, integrate guidance directly inside design and development workflows, and shape a durable “source of truth” that can power automation, guardrails, and AI-assisted workflows. You’ll collaborate with an 8-person foundations team and cross-functional partners to unlock velocity and consistency for product teams serving millions of customers.

Requirements

6+ years of experience in product design (or equivalent), including shipping and maintaining a design system adopted by multiple product teams.
Portfolio showcasing design systems mastery (components, patterns, tokens, governance) and cross-platform consistency; portfolio link required.
Technical fluency collaborating in component-based workflows (e.g., Figma component libraries and Storybook or equivalent) with a strong understanding of how implementation constraints shape UX.
Hands-on experience with token pipelines and tooling (e.g., CSS variables, semantic token architectures) and writing implementation-aware specs with acceptance criteria.
Proven accessibility competency applied to systems (e.g., WCAG 2.1 AA) with accessible defaults and patterns.
Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve delivery speed and quality for design systems (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation).
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 with AI-assisted coding and design environments (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and building Figma plugins or linting/guardrail tooling.
Track record implementing scalable theming, density, and semantic token strategies across multiple products or platforms.
Experience facilitating design sprints, co-creation workshops, or component governance reviews with cross-functional stakeholders.
Data fluency leveraging telemetry, adoption metrics, and experiments to inform system roadmap and deprecation strategies.
Familiarity with versioned monorepos or multi-package design system releases, including change management and migration planning.

Responsibilities

Own and drive the design system roadmap—prioritizing by product needs, system health, and adoption friction—while aligning stakeholders on a clear, forward-looking vision.
Define and evolve system UX: components, patterns, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults that scale across products and platforms.
Lead token strategy end to end (primitive and semantic), including theming, density, and extensibility, and partner with engineering to maintain consistent component APIs.
Establish strong governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans to reduce system drift.
Create implementation-aware specs with edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria; collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Figma libraries, Storybook) to ensure design-to-code fidelity.
Build design enablement in context—linting rules, templates, and plugin experiences—supported by a structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, examples) that powers automation and AI-assisted support.
Use AI tools intentionally to streamline audits, consistency checks, migrations, and spec generation; contribute to AI-assisted workflows that help teams adopt changes safely.
Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution.