# Sr. Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

**Company:** [Kong](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/kong)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Product Design
**Salary:** $150k – $250k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Design Systems, Figma, wcag, Accessibility, design tokens, Prototyping, UI Design, Visual Design, component libraries, design documentation
**Posted:** 2026-07-24

> Sr. Staff Product Designer owning the visual language, components, templates, and evolution of Kong's design system. Requires 8+ years experience, exceptional visual craft, systems thinking, accessibility expertise, and a bias toward shipped product cohesion while mentoring the design team.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Define and own the visual design direction of the design system, including color, type, spacing, elevation, and motion, focusing on beauty, delight, and high craft.
- Set and maintain high standards of polish, thinking through every component's states, variants, and edge cases.
- Keep the design system meticulously organized, documented, and easy to use, with clear guidance, examples, do's/don'ts, and worked examples.
- Build accessibility in from the start, including support for high contrast mode, and partner with engineering to meet WCAG and beyond.
- Own the evolution of design tokens, color themes, and foundational styling for a cohesive, scalable system.
- Design and maintain page templates and layout patterns for consistent, high-quality starting points.
- Partner with the Design Technologist on integration with AI prototyping kits and Figma ↔ code workflows.
- Be accountable to the real, live product to ensure a beautiful, cohesive, modern, high-quality customer-facing UI.
- Run office hours, engage in critiques, mentor and coach designers on systems thinking and craft.
- Actively track and address drift between the system and shipped product, partnering with engineering on a backlog to close gaps.
- Look for opportunities to merge, simplify, or improve existing patterns.

## Requirements
- 8+ years of product design experience, including significant time owning or co-owning a design system at scale.
- Exceptional modern visual design craft with strong, well-reasoned opinions on type, color, spacing, and motion.
- Detail-oriented and organized approach to systems work, naturally thinking in states, variants, and edge cases.
- Solid working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and experience partnering with engineers on accessible component implementation, including high contrast support.
- Track record of enabling a team of designers through documentation, critique, office hours, or direct coaching.
- Bias toward the shipped product over theoretical systems; preference for addressing real-world drift.
- Comfort partnering directly with engineering on implementation tradeoffs, component APIs, and leading a design system roadmap.
- Strong communication skills to write clear guidance and hold ground on craft while remaining collaborative.
- Portfolio demonstrating strong modern visual and interaction design craft, design system work (component libraries, templates, pattern documentation), evidence of enabling other designers, accessibility considerations, and driving system changes to shipped product outcomes.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Comfort collaborating on AI-assisted prototyping and Figma ↔ code workflows.

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