Staff Product Designer, Patterns & Design Innovation

Pinterest is a platform that inspires creativity and innovation for millions of users around the world. They are seeking a Staff Product Designer to lead the development and stewardship of design systems and component libraries, ensuring high-quality user experiences across their core surfaces.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Mentor & Scale Impact: Inspire and guide other designers in craft, systemic thinking, and best practices through critique, guidance, and sharing your expertise across teams
• Champion Accessibility & Inclusion: Ensure our design systems support diverse user needs and raise the bar on inclusion and accessibility from the ground up
• Communicate & Influence: Clearly articulate your design thinking, rationale, and vision—presenting work to teams, leaders, and executives, and rallying consensus

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in product design, with significant time spent driving or evolving design systems or pattern libraries
• 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—ideally in large-scale consumer or platform environments
• Design technologist mindset: Comfortable experimenting with Figma prototypes, AI, and (optionally) front-end code; curious and opinionated about technical feasibility, accessibility, and how we can streamline design workflows and processes through systems and tools
• Expert-level motion and visual design skills, with a deep understanding of principles and their impact on usability, comprehension, and overall experience quality — using animation and transitions to enhance clarity, convey emotion, and drive user engagement
• Excellent communicator who can synthesize ambiguity into actionable design problems and unite teams through clarity, documentation, and collaboration
• Growth mindset with a passion for ongoing learning, experimentation, and mentoring others
• 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
• 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