Sr. Product Designer II - Design Systems

ABOUT THE ROLE Instacart is a leading grocery delivery company that's transforming the industry by providing customers with access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. As a Sr. Product Designer II - Design Systems, you'll play a critical role in shaping the company's design system, ensuring it's scalable, consistent, and meets the needs of millions of customers. WHAT YOU'LL DO In this role, you'll be responsible for leading the evolution of Instacart's design system, prioritizing by product needs, system health, and adoption friction. You'll work closely with engineering and design technologists to ensure design-to-code fidelity, integrate guidance directly inside design and development workflows, and shape a durable "source of truth" that can power automation, guardrails, and AI-assisted workflows. Your key responsibilities will include: * Owning and driving the design system roadmap, aligning stakeholders on a clear, forward-looking vision * 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 * 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 * Bachelor's degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience WHY REMOTE Instacart is a Flex First team, which means we offer flexibility and autonomy to our employees to choose where they do their best work. We believe that this approach allows our team members to be more productive, happy, and fulfilled. BENEFITS As a remote employee, you'll have access to a range of benefits, including a comprehensive health plan, parental leave, education stipend, life insurance, and flexible schedule.