Senior Product Designer II - Design Systems
Instacart Remote (đ¨đŚ Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada)
The role involves owning the design system as a product, driving its roadmap based on product needs and system health, and defining the UX for components and patterns, including interaction states and accessibility defaults. Responsibilities also include leading the token strategy, establishing system governance, and partnering with engineering to ensure clean code implementation and design-to-code fidelity.
Responsibilities
- Drive the design system roadmap: prioritize based on product needs, system health, and adoption friction
- Define and evolve component and pattern UX: anatomy, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults
- Lead token strategy (primitive + semantic): semantics, theming, density, and scalable extensibility across products
- Establish and maintain system governance: contribution standards, quality bar, review process, versioning, deprecations, and migration plans
- Partner with design technologists, engineers and product design teams to ensure design-to-code fidelity, consistent component APIs, and minimal system drift
- Ensure high-quality standards of implementation-aware specs (not just visuals): edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria
- Collaborate with Design Technologists to translate system guidance into in-tool guardrails (linting, templates, plugin experiences)
- Help define the systemâs structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, do/donât, examples) so it can power automation and AI-assisted support
- Identify design enablement workflow opportunities and prioritize enablement opportunities that reduce rework and raise consistency
- Establish strong governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans to reduce system drift
- Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution
- Use AI tools intentionally to streamline system work (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation, change summaries)
- Contribute to AI-assisted workflows that reduce system toil and help teams adopt changes safely
Requirements
- 6+ years in product design (or equivalent) with proven experience shipping and maintaining a design system used by multiple teams
- Strong design fundamentals: interaction design, visual systems, hierarchy, and responsive patterns
- Design systems mastery: components, patterns, tokens, governance, adoption, systems-thinking, documentation, and cross-platform consistency
- Technical fluency: able to collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Storybook or equivalent) and understand how implementation constraints shape UX
- Strong accessibility competency applied to systems (WCAG compliance, etc)
- Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve speed and quality (not just ideation, real workflow impact)
- Experience with token pipelines (CSS variables, semantic token architectures, token tooling)
- Experience driving adoption through metrics, migrations, and enablement programs
- Bachelorâs degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Benefits
- Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits
- Remote work policy
- New hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants
- Access to continuous training and development opportunities
Key Skills
About Instacart
Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 85,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for approximately 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders on their own flexible schedule. The Instacart Platform offers retailers a suite of enterprise-grade technology products and services to power their e-commerce experiences, fulfill orders, digitize brick-and-mortar stores, provide advertising services, and glean insights. With Instacart Ads, thousands of CPG brands â from category leaders to emerging brands â partner with the company to connect directly with consumers online, ri
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