Role Overview
- Own and evolve Replits design system end-to-end, including components, patterns, principles, and governance.
- Collaborate with product designers, engineers, and design engineers for system scalability and enterprise adoption.
- Define system evolution, decision-making processes, and balance consistency with flexibility.
Responsibilities
- Lead vision, strategy, and roadmap for the design system.
- Define and evolve core components, patterns, tokens, and interaction standards.
- Support diverse surfaces from core UI to enterprise templates and customer-integrated systems.
- Partner with product designers and engineers to build new features on system primitives.
- Design for extensibility including custom stacks and customer-specific theming.
- Improve discoverability, clarity, and usability of system-driven UI.
- Collaborate with design engineers on implementation details and system architecture.
- Influence code-level decisions affecting system consistency and adoption.
- Shape tooling, Storybook usage, and contribution workflows.
- Establish contribution models, review processes, and decision frameworks for system changes.
- Provide guidance and sign-off on system-level decisions as domain owner.
- Document principles, patterns, and rationale for scalable decision making.
- Identify inconsistencies and drive systematic improvements across the product.
- Balance speed and craft, advocating for system-level thinking across teams.
Experience and Skills
- 10+ years of product design experience with deep ownership of a design system at scale.
- Strong systems thinker understanding patterns, abstractions, and long-term impacts.
- Experience collaborating closely with engineers on component APIs and implementation details.
- Ability to operate at multiple levels from high-level principles to pixel-level decisions.
- Proven track record evolving complex component libraries and supporting multiple product variations.
- Strong opinions on system governance, contribution models, and adoption strategies.
- Highly collaborative and influential without hierarchy.
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making pragmatic decisions.
Nice to Have
- Experience with developer-focused products or tools.
- Familiarity with design tokens, theming, and cross-platform systems.
- Background in or strong partnership with design engineering.