Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

Etsy•New York, NY

22h•$168,000 - $253,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Etsy is seeking a Staff Product Designer to join the Design Systems team within UX Platform. This role will focus on driving the growth and architecture of Etsy's design system, Collage, which powers all buyer and seller surfaces across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter. The position involves refining component structures, composition, cross-platform consistency, and the overall evolution of the system. The ideal candidate will have experience working with mature design systems, a strong understanding of component lifecycles, and a collaborative, transparent working style. This is a full-time position reporting to the Senior Product Design Manager for Design Systems and UX AI Enablement.

Requirements

A portfolio showing design systems work at scale: component architecture, token systems, and delivery across web, iOS, and Android, where platform constraints differ and coherence is a deliberate choice.
Judgment about where the system should be opinionated and where it should stay flexible.
Thinking in composition rather than accumulation — primitives that combine, not a new component for every case.
Treating the system as a quality floor that has to keep rising as product teams reach higher.
Comfort flexing how you work to reach a quality result, using agentic tools like Cursor or Claude effectively.
Understanding the coded medium and infrastructure you're designing into, enough to know what will hold up and what won't.
A transparent way of working: writing things down, sharing reasoning, and opening problems up.
Genuine comfort working with engineers, including reading component implementations and discussing build constraints.
Strong visual craft and a rigorous eye for typography, color, space, and density as system-level decisions.
Accessibility standards built into design decisions.
Ability to operate in ambiguity, frame poorly-defined problems, align stakeholders, and execute without a clear brief.
Excellent communication and storytelling skills, able to explain system structure to leadership and technical details to engineers.

Responsibilities

Architect the system, refining component anatomy, API and composition models, variant strategies, and token structures.
Make decisions that hold across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter, balancing cross-platform coherence with platform convention.
Anticipate how the system needs to flex before consuming teams ask.
Refine the component lifecycle, defining processes for proposal, prioritization, design, documentation, graduation, and deprecation.
Close gaps between one-off requests and durable system additions, including the path from product-team patterns into the system.
Make the system operable at scale by structuring tokens, component metadata, and documentation for programmatic operation.
Use agentic tools like Cursor or Claude to prototype architecture, validate decisions, and automate manual work.
Work in the open by documenting decisions, involving the team in architecture problems, and using critique for thinking.
Drive adoption through hands-on partnership with consuming teams to understand and fix system failures.
Partner deeply with engineering leads to ensure design decisions are implementable, token-backed, and performant.
Engage early with engineering to influence what gets built.
Set and hold the quality bar for accessibility, precision, and completeness.
Model finished component standards, including states, edge cases, content dimensions, localization, and motion.
Lead cross-squad design objectives and provide strategic leadership connecting to UX Platform's overall strategy.
Set visual and interaction standards that resolve complex problems across multiple surfaces and platforms.
Contribute strategic improvements to the design system and drive adoption of new components and patterns.
Help designers across the organization adapt their work to fit existing patterns and platform conventions.
Build prototypes to clarify direction and create organizational alignment.
Influence priorities and roadmaps, balancing near-term delivery with long-term system vision.
Model giving and applying feedback to raise the quality of work.
Evolve the team's ways of working, intake process, and documentation practices.