Design Systems Lead
$220,000–$280,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Bootstrap and own an intuitive semantic token system across multiple platforms and frameworks while maintaining the design system repo on GitHub as the source of truth for components, tokens, and standards. Set and uphold high visual design quality, navigating nuances between mobile, web, and React UI best practices to encode them into the system. Define the contribution model and governance by reviewing inbound contributions from product feature teams and keeping design and engineering in sync by bridging Figma and code. Maintain clear documentation to drive adoption through onboarding and support, baking in accessibility and theming as defaults. Manage the system roadmap balancing net-new work, migrations, and deprecations, while integrating new AI tooling into the workflow. Operate with autonomy in a fast-moving environment to keep Perplexity's product coherent as it scales.
Required Qualifications
- Extensive experience owning design systems at large organizations
- A true 50/50 design-engineer, equally credible in visual craft and in code
- An impeccable eye for visual design
- Deep understanding of the nuanced differences between mobile, web, and React UI best practices
- Strong product sensibilities to help evaluate and integrate contributions from various product feature teams
- Fluency in Figma, but primarily living in GitHub where you own the repo
- Experience designing and maintaining semantic design tokens and scalable component APIs
- A track record of driving adoption through excellent documentation and cross-functional partnership
- Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and how to build them into a system
- Readiness to work with new AI tooling and genuine comfort with ambiguity
Desired Qualifications
- Experience building a semantic token system from scratch across multiple platforms
- A track record scaling a design system through a period of fast org growth
- Experience defining contribution models and governance for multi-team design systems
- Familiarity with component tooling and documentation platforms (e.g., Storybook)
- Experience mentoring designers and engineers and growing a design systems practice
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