Staff Product Designer, Patterns & Design Innovation

Pinterest Pinterest · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · Design

Staff Product Designer focused on systematizing quality and advocating for world-class experiences across Pinterest’s core surfaces. This role will shape the next generation of Pinterest’s design systems and component libraries, partnering with cross-functional teams to deliver on the mission in an effective, scalable, and human-centered way. The designer will be a methodological systems thinker, craft champion, and design technologist, with impact stretching across teams, product lines, and the building blocks of Pinterest.

What you'd actually do

  1. Drive System Quality: Lead the stewardship, evolution, and adoption of our core design patterns, component libraries, and gestalt subsystems—ensuring cohesive, delightful, and accessible user experiences at scale.
  2. Partner Horizontally: Act as a strategic advisor and a hands-on partner to product, engineering, and design teams across Personalisation and core surfaces, empowering them to leverage best-in-class patterns and ship with confidence.
  3. Advance Systemic Thinking: Apply methodical, systematic approaches to pattern creation: balancing product usability, craft, accessibility, and business needs—with input from a wide range of stakeholders.
  4. Prototype & Technologize: Rapidly visualize, prototype, and validate new ideas; translate abstract solutions into practical, scalable patterns using Figma, code, AI, or whatever is needed to inspire clarity and adoption.
  5. Uphold and Elevate Craft: Conduct quality audits, review flows and handoffs, and directly contribute hands-on design when needed—always advocating for the highest standards.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience in product design
  • Portfolio demonstrating polished interface design, systemic thinking, component-based UIs, and tangible influence across large organizations
  • Track record in staff/principal-level roles, influencing horizontally, upholding design craft quality, and partnering cross-functionally
  • Design technologist mindset
  • Expert-level motion and visual design skills
  • Excellent communicator
  • Demonstrated commitment to inclusion, accessibility, and crafting systems that serve diverse audiences
  • Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as design, or equivalent experience

Nice to have

  • Experience leading platform-wide or multi-product design system initiatives
  • Familiarity with personalization, large consumer apps, or rapid scale environments
  • Contributions to public design systems, open-source libraries, or industry talks/writing

What the JD emphasized

  • significant time spent driving or evolving design systems or pattern libraries
  • Track record in staff/principal-level roles, influencing horizontally, upholding design craft quality, and partnering cross-functionally
  • Design technologist mindset
  • Comfortable experimenting with Figma prototypes, AI, and (optionally) front-end code