Principal Product Designer, Design Systems & AI

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Product Designer, Design Systems & AI based in United States. This is a senior individual contributor role with end-to-end ownership of a design system spanning multiple product surfaces.

You’ll shape its architecture, governance, tooling, and evolution while partnering closely with engineering on a major component migration.

Beyond systems design, you’ll define how product design evolves in an increasingly agentic AI environment.

You’ll establish reusable patterns, workflows, and tools for AI-powered experiences and bring the first of these ideas into production.

The role combines hands-on design, technical collaboration, prototyping, and design-system leadership.

You’ll work with a highly experienced, collaborative team where influence, autonomy, and craft matter more than hierarchy.

Your work will directly improve product consistency, engineering efficiency, and the quality of AI experiences across the platform.

Accountabilities

• Own the design system as a product, including design tokens, component libraries, documentation, code components, architecture, and adoption across converging product surfaces.
• Lead the migration of the component architecture to a modern stack, partnering with engineering to define scope, prioritize work, and deliver production-quality components.
• Establish durable governance covering versioning, contributions, releases, design-to-engineering handoffs, and shared definitions of done.
• Develop an AI-forward design practice by creating patterns, guidelines, tooling, and workflows for agentic product experiences.
• Design and ship AI-powered product experiences while ensuring patterns are reusable and scalable across the broader platform.
• Work directly in design and code, including production-stack prototyping, component implementation reviews, and technical architecture discussions.
• Use AI-assisted development and design tools such as Claude Code, critically reviewing and validating generated outputs before they reach production.
• Raise the quality bar across the senior design organization through critique, pairing, mentorship, and visible hands-on craft.
• Measure and improve design-system adoption, design-to-engineering handoff efficiency, rework, governance maturity, and reuse of AI-forward patterns.

Requirements

• 12+ years of professional product design experience, including several years owning and scaling design systems, with hands-on expertise in tokens, component architecture, libraries, and governance.
• Strong engineering fluency, including comfort working with TypeScript/React codebases, Storybook, and technical architecture discussions with engineers.
• Proven experience leading a production design-system migration or re-platforming initiative, including the ability to determine what should ship, what should be deferred, and why.
• Demonstrated experience designing AI-driven or agentic product experiences and a practical understanding of how AI is changing product design.
• Professional experience using AI-assisted tools, such as Claude Code, with the judgment to review, test, and validate AI-generated output before release.
• Proven ability to lead through influence in flat, complex, or ambiguous environments, establishing operating models and direction rather than simply following existing processes.
• Strong communication, collaboration, critical-thinking, and decision-making skills, with the ability to work effectively across design and engineering.
• Experience with developer tools, data science, technical audiences, open-source design systems, component libraries, design tooling, Figma plugins, or AI-assisted design workflows is highly desirable.
• Experience working across multi-product or converging platforms where a shared design system serves as connective infrastructure is a strong advantage.
• A commitment to inclusive collaboration, candid communication, thoughtful critique, and creating an environment where people from diverse backgrounds can thrive.

Benefits

• Base salary of $146,500–$216,000, depending on role level, location, skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
• Annual bonus potential and equity participation.
• Fully remote work environment with flexible working hours.
• Flexible vacation policy.
• Medical, dental, and visio…