Sr. Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

Kong is building the future of AI connectivity and API management. They are seeking a Sr. Staff Product Designer, Design Systems to define and own the visual and interaction language for their platform, ensuring it is consistently and beautifully implemented in customer-facing products.

Responsibilities:

• Own the visual design direction of our design system — color, type, spacing, elevation, motion — with an eye for beauty and delight, not just function
• Set and maintain a level of craft and polish that raises the bar for the whole design team
• Think through every component's states, variants, and edge cases across the range of ways it'll actually get used
• Keep the system meticulously organized and documented so it's genuinely easy for other designers to find and use
• Build in accessibility from the start — support things like our high contrast mode, and partner with engineering on how components should be implemented to meet accessibility standards (WCAG and beyond)
• Own the evolution of our design tokens, color themes, and foundational styling to ensure a cohesive, scalable, and visually compelling design system
• Design and maintain page templates and layout patterns that give designers a consistent, high-quality starting point — especially around layout, spacing, and hierarchy between components
• Partner with our Design Technologist on how the system translates into our AI prototyping kit and Figma ↔ code workflows
• Be accountable to the real, live product — success is a beautiful, cohesive, modern, high-quality customer-facing UI, not a pristine system that designers quietly detach from or engineers bypass
• Run office hours, be engaged in critiques, and stay embedded enough in day-to-day design work to know how the system is actually being used
• Write clear guidance and examples — not just "here's the component," but which component or variation fits which use case, with do's/don'ts and worked examples
• Help designers navigate ambiguous situations where more than one pattern could reasonably apply
• Mentor and coach designers across the team on systems thinking and craft
• Actively track down drift between the system and what's shipped, and partner with engineering on a backlog to close the gap
• Look for opportunities to merge, simplify, or improve existing patterns in the product

Requirements:

• 8+ years of product design experience, including significant time owning or co-owning a design system at scale
• Exceptional modern visual design craft — you can point to work you're genuinely proud of, and you have strong, well-reasoned opinions about type, color, spacing, and motion
• A detail-oriented, organized approach to systems work — you naturally think in states, variants, and edge cases
• Solid working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and experience partnering with engineers on accessible component implementation, including things like high contrast support
• A track record of enabling a team of designers — through documentation, critique, office hours, or direct coaching — not just building components in isolation
• A bias toward the shipped product over the theoretical system: you'd rather chase down real-world drift than polish a spec no one uses
• Comfort partnering directly with engineering on implementation tradeoffs and component APIs, and leading a roadmap of design system work
• Strong communication skills — you can write guidance that's actually clear, and you can hold your ground on craft while staying easy to work with
• Comfort collaborating on AI-assisted prototyping and Figma ↔ code workflows is a plus