Sr Product Designer, Design Systems Foundations

Adobe Adobe · Enterprise · San Francisco, CA +1

This role is for a Sr. Product Designer focused on building and evolving a design system for Adobe's Document Cloud Foundations. The designer will define system architecture, primitives, components, and patterns, ensuring consistency and quality across products. Responsibilities include partnering with engineering, establishing design system principles, auditing existing experiences, and mentoring other designers. The role requires experience in product design, design systems, and collaboration with cross-functional teams, with a strong emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity.

What you'd actually do

  1. 0→1 design system efforts for an emerging team within Document Cloud, defining system architecture, foundational primitives, components, and scalable patterns.
  2. Design, document, and maintain reusable UI components, interaction patterns, and guidelines that ensure consistency and quality across products.
  3. Partner closely with engineering to align on implementation strategies, tokens, and component APIs.
  4. Establish and evolve design system principles, standards, and contribution models to support long-term scalability and governance.
  5. Audit existing product experiences to identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and opportunities for systematization.

Skills

Required

  • product design
  • design system
  • design tokens
  • theming
  • scalable styling systems
  • component libraries
  • Storybook
  • Figma libraries
  • accessibility standards
  • WCAG
  • collaboration
  • documentation
  • ambiguity tolerance

Nice to have

  • communication skills
  • front-end technologies
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • governance models
  • contribution workflows
  • adoption strategies
  • influencing without authority
  • measuring design system adoption

What the JD emphasized

  • 5+ years of experience in product design, with a strong portfolio demonstrating experience designing or contributing to a design system at scale and cross-platform.
  • Familiarity with design tokens, theming, and scalable styling systems.
  • Experience collaborating on or contributing to component libraries (e.g., Storybook, Figma libraries, or similar tools).
  • Understanding of accessibility standards (WCAG) and how to apply them systematically across components.
  • A history of close collaboration with design, product management, software development, and users from ideation through implementation.
  • Strong documentation skills, with an ability to create clear, scalable guidance for diverse audiences.
  • Comfort operating in ambiguous, evolving spaces, especially early-stage system work.