Design Systems Lead

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term vision and roadmap for Imprint's design system, balancing immediate product needs with long-term platform investments.
• Partner deeply with Product Design, Engineering, Product Management, and AI teams to ensure system components are scalable, maintainable, production-ready, and aligned to shared priorities.
• Establish governance, contribution models, and decision-making frameworks that give product teams a shared source of truth and let them move faster without sacrificing quality or consistency.
• Evolve the design system beyond traditional Figma libraries and Storybook documentation toward machine-readable, AI-consumable foundations that connect design tooling, code generation, and AI-assisted development.
• Mentor a small team of design systems designers and partner with developers, raising the bar on systems thinking, prioritization, and ownership across the group.
• Stay hands-on by contributing directly to component architecture, documentation, patterns, and guidelines, and by leading complex initiatives from strategy through execution.

Requirements

• 8+ years of product design experience, including significant design systems ownership and experience leading or managing design systems teams.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling design systems used across multiple product teams in a production environment.
• Deep understanding of component architecture, design tokens, accessibility standards, and design-to-development workflows.
• Strong product judgment with the ability to prioritize high-impact work and make tradeoffs between near-term product needs and long-term system investments.
• Experience partnering closely with frontend engineers and engineering leadership to ship system components that are actually adopted and trusted.
• Comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment where you own both the strategy and the execution, and where the system needs to evolve continuously.
• Excellent ability to communicate and influence across functions, including educating and advocating for design systems with teams that haven't worked with one before.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with modern frontend technologies, component-based development, Storybook, and design token infrastructure.
• Experience with AI-assisted design, code generation, or agent-driven workflows, particularly in exploring how AI transforms the way products are designed and built.
• Background in design engineering or highly technical product environments where the line between design and development is intentionally blurred.
• Experience building design systems in high-growth startup environments where the system had to scale alongside rapid product expansion.

Stack

• Figma
• Storybook
• Design tokens
• Frontend component libraries (React/TypeScript)
• AI-assisted design and development tooling