Staff Design Systems Designer

Harvey Harvey · AI Frontier · New York, NY · Design

Staff Design Systems Designer responsible for defining and evolving the design system foundations (components, patterns, tokens) for an AI-native product, ensuring coherence, scalability, and trustworthiness across complex AI-powered experiences. This role collaborates closely with frontend and platform engineering to ship production-ready system components, establish governance models, and advocate for system adoption, while embedding accessibility, responsiveness, and performance.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and evolve the core design system foundations, including components, patterns, and tokens that scale across complex, AI-powered experiences — with a sharp eye for brand cohesion and visual quality
  2. Design, prototype, and ship production-ready system components in tight collaboration with frontend engineering
  3. Bring a brand lens to system decisions, ensuring the product feels considered and distinctive, not just consistent
  4. Establish clear contribution, governance, and deprecation models that balance velocity with system integrity
  5. Embed accessibility, responsiveness, and performance into the system by default

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience in product design
  • significant ownership of design systems in complex product environments
  • Deep understanding of component architecture, design tokens, and how design systems scale across teams
  • Proven experience partnering closely with frontend engineers to ship high-quality, production systems
  • Strong working knowledge of accessibility standards and inclusive design practices
  • Ability to clearly articulate system decisions and tradeoffs to designers, engineers, and cross-functional partners
  • Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and bringing structure where it doesn’t yet exist

Nice to have

  • background in brand or visual design
  • portfolio that demonstrates not just system-level thinking, but a strong point of view on craft, quality, and visual cohesion

What the JD emphasized

  • design systems
  • AI-powered experiences
  • AI-native product