Staff Product Designer, Design System

Replit•Foster City, CA

About The Position

Replit is the agentic software creation platform that enables anyone to build applications using natural language. With millions of users worldwide and over 500,000 business users, Replit is democratizing software development by removing traditional barriers to application creation. We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer, Design System to own and evolve Replit’s design system end-to-end. This role sits at the intersection of product design, design engineering, and platform thinking, with direct impact on both internal velocity and external enterprise adoption. The Role As Staff Product Designer for the Design System, you will be the primary owner and steward of Replit’s design system—its components, patterns, principles, and governance. You’ll work closely with product designers, engineers, and design engineers to ensure the system scales across the product, supports enterprise use cases (including customer-integrated design systems), and enables fast, high-quality product development. This is a senior, high-leverage role. You’ll define not just what the system is, but how it evolves, how decisions get made, and how consistency and flexibility are balanced as Replit ships rapidly.

Requirements

10+ years of product design experience, with deep ownership of a design system at scale.
Strong systems thinker: you see patterns, abstractions, and long-term implications.
Experience collaborating closely with engineers on component APIs, implementation details, and constraints.
Comfort operating at multiple levels—from high-level principles to pixel- and interaction-level decisions.
Proven track record of designing and evolving complex component libraries.
Experience supporting multiple products, teams, or customer-specific variations from a shared system.
Strong opinions on system governance, contribution models, and adoption strategies.
Highly collaborative, with the ability to influence without relying on hierarchy.
Comfortable navigating ambiguity and incomplete information.
Pragmatic: you know when to ship, when to refactor, and when to say no.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with developer-focused products or tools.
Familiarity with design tokens, theming, and cross-platform systems.
Background in or strong partnership with design engineering.

Responsibilities

Own the Design System
Lead the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Replit’s design system.
Define and evolve core components, patterns, tokens, and interaction standards used across the product.
Ensure the system supports a wide range of surfaces, from core product UI to Agent flows, enterprise templates, and customer-integrated design systems.
Enable Product & Enterprise Scale
Partner with product designers and engineers to ensure new features are built on system primitives.
Design for extensibility: support custom stacks, enterprise design systems, and customer-specific theming without fragmentation.
Improve discoverability, clarity, and usability of system-driven UI across key entry points.
Partner Deeply with Engineering
Collaborate closely with design engineers on implementation details, tradeoffs, and system architecture.
Influence code-level decisions that affect system consistency and adoption.
Help shape tooling, Storybook usage, and contribution workflows so the system is easy to use and maintain.
Set Standards & Governance
Establish clear contribution models, review processes, and decision-making frameworks for system changes.
Act as a design system “domain owner,” providing guidance and sign-off on system-level decisions.
Document principles, patterns, and rationale so decisions scale beyond individuals.
Raise the Bar for Design Quality
Identify inconsistencies, duplication, and fragmentation across the product and drive systematic improvements.
Balance speed with craft—knowing when to be opinionated and when to enable flexibility.
Advocate for system-level thinking across product, design, and engineering.