Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

Turo•San Francisco, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Turo’s design system is live on iOS, Android, and web, but it isn’t yet pulling its weight. Coverage is uneven, and product teams often find themselves working around the system rather than with it. As a staff product designer on the design systems team you’re here to change that. Your mission is to turn the system into the default starting point and build an intuitive and high-quality system that teams reach for naturally. You’ll build a foundation that’s clear enough for people to use today and structured well enough for AI agents, ensuring Turo’s design language scales effortlessly.

Requirements

8+ years of experience designing product experiences, with a focus on evolving design systems with gaps and workarounds into trusted foundations.
Shipped components and patterns used by multiple product teams across mobile and web.
Deep fluency with tokens, component architecture, variants, and Figma systems craft.
Experience with Claude Code (or other agentic coding tools), MCPs, and other AI workflows.
A working model of design system governance. You know when to ship a new layer of the system, when to extend, and when to say no. You can also confidently defend those calls to leadership.
Experience partnering with platform engineers on implementation, parity, and release cadence.
A track record of scaling your impact through others. Workshops, written guidance, critique, and mentorship are part of how you work, not afterthoughts.
Clear written communication. You can write documentation a junior designer, a staff engineer, and an agent can all use.

Nice To Haves

Experience building and maintaining linters for design teams.
Exposure to token pipelines, Style Dictionary, or equivalent cross-platform token infrastructure.
History contributing to accessibility standards or tooling.

Responsibilities

Audit & analysis: Take a holistic look at our products to spot where the system is drifting or falling short. Untangle overlapping root causes and find the high-leverage fixes that solve problems for multiple teams at once, ensuring our solutions scale as fast as our products.
Component lifecycle & governance: Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of components by handling versioning, documentation, and deprecation. Establish the release cadences and migration paths that product teams rely on to plan their work. Create a clear governance model to ensure the system remains stable and predictable as it evolves.
System architecture & legibility: Build a system that speaks a universal language. Name and structure components, tokens, and patterns clearly allowing anyone, from a designer to an AI agent, to find what they need to ship. High-quality documentation is a core part of your process, serving both the people building the product and the tools they use to automate it.
Quality standards & accessibility: Define and enforce quality standards for interaction, visual detail, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA minimum), and platform fidelity. Raise the bar through critique, contribution, education, and example.
Cross-functional partnership: Partner with feature teams through office hours, pairing sessions, and contribution reviews. Help teams navigate patterns the system doesn't yet cover and decide when a design should become a global standard or remain a local solution.
Education & advocacy: Teach the system through workshops, clear guidance, and constructive critique. Raise the entire team's system fluency so that success is measured by how effectively everyone builds together, not just by what you ship.
Design-to-code integration: Bridge the gap between Figma and production by building coded starting points, token demos, and high-fidelity prototypes. Use the right tool for the job, whether it is using canvas-based design tools for exploration, agentic coding tools for rapid iteration, or production code when accessibility and platform fidelity matter most. Partner with engineering to validate ideas early and ensure system improvements scale across iOS, Android, and web.

Benefits

Competitive salary, equity, benefits, and perks for all full-time employees
Employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance (Country specific)
Retirement employer match
Learning & Development stipend to invest in your professional development
Turo host matching program
Turo travel credit
Cell phone and internet stipend
Paid time off to relax and recharge
Paid holidays, volunteer time off, and parental leave
In-office lunch, office snacks, and fun activities (for in-office full-time or hybrid employees)