Senior Product Designer II - Design Systems

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential delivery services while offering flexible earning opportunities. The Senior Product Designer II will own the design system as a product, focusing on its quality, usability, scalability, and adoption, while collaborating with engineering and design teams to ensure effective implementation.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the design system roadmap: prioritize based on product needs, system health, and adoption friction
• Demonstrated ability to set a clear, forward‑looking vision for design system evolution and drive stakeholder alignment
• Define and evolve component and pattern UX: anatomy, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults
• Lead token strategy (primitive + semantic): semantics, theming, density, and scalable extensibility across products
• Establish and maintain system governance: contribution standards, quality bar, review process, versioning, deprecations, and migration plans
• Partner with design technologists, engineers and product design teams to ensure design-to-code fidelity, consistent component APIs, and minimal system drift
• Ensure high-quality standards of implementation-aware specs (not just visuals): edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria
• Collaborate with Design Technologists to translate system guidance into in-tool guardrails (linting, templates, plugin experiences)
• Help define the system’s structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, do/don’t, examples) so it can power automation and AI-assisted support
• Identify design enablement workflow opportunities and prioritize enablement opportunities that reduce rework and raise consistency
• Establish strong governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans to reduce system drift
• Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution
• Use AI tools intentionally to streamline system work (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation, change summaries)
• Contribute to AI-assisted workflows that reduce system toil and help teams adopt changes safely
• Proactive mindset learning and working with AI-prototyping tools and design enablement processes

Requirements:

• 6+ years in product design (or equivalent) with proven experience shipping and maintaining a design system used by multiple teams
• Strong design fundamentals: interaction design, visual systems, hierarchy, and responsive patterns
• Design systems mastery: components, patterns, tokens, governance, adoption, systems-thinking, documentation, and cross-platform consistency
• Technical fluency: able to collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Storybook or equivalent) and understand how implementation constraints shape UX
• Strong accessibility competency applied to systems (WCAG compliance, etc)
• Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve speed and quality (not just ideation, real workflow impact)
• Experience with token pipelines (CSS variables, semantic token architectures, token tooling)
• Experience driving adoption through metrics, migrations, and enablement programs
• Experience driving system adoption through metrics, deprecation/migration programs, and cross-functional enablement
• Bachelor's degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience working with AI‑assisted coding environments such as Cursor and Claude Code
• Strong foundation in human-centered design thinking methodologies
• Proven ability to facilitate design sprints and collaborative ideation sessions
• Proven ability to empathize and balance needs of multiple (internal and external) users, define problems, ideate solutions, prototype concepts, and test iteratively
• Proven track record of applying design and systems thinking frameworks to drive innovation and solve challenging problems