Staff Design Systems Designer

Harvey Harvey · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Design

Staff Design Systems Designer to define and evolve the core design system foundations (components, patterns, tokens) for an AI-native product, ensuring consistency, scalability, and trustworthiness across complex AI-powered experiences. This role involves close collaboration with frontend and platform engineering to ship production-ready system components and establish governance models. The goal is to enable faster team development, reduce user cognitive load, and build trust in AI-driven workflows.

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. Partner directly with frontend and platform engineers to ensure system decisions translate cleanly into code, with shared ownership of quality, performance, and maintainability
  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
  • An excellent portfolio demonstrating system-level thinking, component design, and real product impact
  • 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

What the JD emphasized

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