# Design Systems Lead

**Company:** [Imprint](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/imprint)
**Location:** New York, NY
**Role:** Product Design
**Salary:** $190k – $210k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Figma, storybook, design tokens, React, TypeScript, component architecture, accessibility standards, Design Systems, ai-assisted design
**Posted:** 2026-07-20

> Lead the vision, roadmap, and evolution of Imprint's design system toward scalable, AI-consumable foundations. Requires 8+ years product design experience with significant design systems leadership, strong frontend collaboration skills, and hands-on component architecture expertise.

## Job Description

## 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

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