Sr. Product Designer II - Design Systems

ABOUT THE ROLE We're transforming the grocery industry at Instacart, where we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. As a Design Systems & Foundations team member, you'll play a key role in building the shared components, tokens, and guidance that power customer, shopper, retailer, and internal tools at scale. We're looking for a design-first, technically fluent product designer to lead the evolution of our design system as a product. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Design Systems & Foundations team lead, you'll be responsible for: - Owning and driving the design system roadmap, prioritizing by product needs, system health, and adoption friction - Defining and evolving system UX, including components, patterns, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults - Leading token strategy end to end, including theming, density, and extensibility, and partnering with engineering to maintain consistent component APIs - Establishing strong governance and lifecycle management, including contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans - Creating implementation-aware specs with edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria, and collaborating in component-based workflows to ensure design-to-code fidelity - Building design enablement in context, including linting rules, templates, and plugin experiences, supported by a structured knowledge model that powers automation and AI-assisted support - Using AI tools intentionally to streamline audits, consistency checks, migrations, and spec generation, and contributing to AI-assisted workflows that help teams adopt changes safely - Measuring adoption and impact, identifying workflow friction, and executing enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you'll need: - 6+ years of experience in product design, including shipping and maintaining a design system adopted by multiple product teams - A portfolio showcasing design systems mastery and cross-platform consistency - Technical fluency collaborating in component-based workflows, with a strong understanding of how implementation constraints shape UX - Hands-on experience with token pipelines and tooling, and writing implementation-aware specs with acceptance criteria - Proven accessibility competency applied to systems, with accessible defaults and patterns - Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve delivery speed and quality for design systems - Experience driving system adoption through metrics, deprecation/migration programs, and cross-functional enablement - A Bachelor's degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience WHY REMOTE Instacart is a Flex First team, which means you'll have the flexibility to choose where you do your best work—whether it's from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. BENEFITS Instacart offers a competitive salary and benefits package, including flexible work arrangements, opportunities for professional growth and development, and a collaborative and dynamic work environment.