Overview
We're transforming the grocery industry at Instacart, inviting the world to share love through food. Our goal is to offer safe and flexible earning opportunities through our grocery delivery service. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions, and weโre building the team to push our shopping cart forward.Instacart is a Flex First team with no one-size-fits-all approach to how we work. Employees can choose their workspace, whether at home, an office, or a coffee shop, while still building community through regular in-person events.
About the Job
- Drive the design system roadmap: prioritize based on product needs, system health, and adoption friction.
- Demonstrated ability to set a clear vision for design system evolution and drive stakeholder alignment.
- Define and evolve component and pattern UX: anatomy, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults.
- Lead token strategy (primitive + semantic): semantics, theming, density, and scalable extensibility across products.
- Establish and maintain system governance: contribution standards, quality bar, review process, versioning, deprecations, and migration plans.
- Partner with design technologists, engineers, and product design teams to ensure design-to-code fidelity, consistent component APIs, and minimal system drift.
- Ensure high-quality standards of implementation-aware specs: edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria.
- Collaborate with Design Technologists to translate system guidance into in-tool guardrails.
- Help define the systemโs structured knowledge model to power automation and AI-assisted support.
- Identify design enablement workflow opportunities and prioritize them.
- Establish strong governance and lifecycle management to reduce system drift.
- Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs.
- Use AI tools intentionally to streamline system work.
- Contribute to AI-assisted workflows that reduce system toil.
About You
- Minimum Qualifications: 6+ years in product design with proven experience in a design system.
- Strong design fundamentals: interaction design, visual systems, hierarchy, and responsive patterns.
- Design systems mastery: components, patterns, tokens, governance, documentation, and consistency.
- Strong accessibility competency applied to systems.
- Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve speed and quality.
- Experience with token pipelines and driving system adoption through metrics.
- Bachelorโs degree in Design, HCI, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience working with AI-assisted coding environments.
- Strong foundation in human-centered design thinking methodologies.
- Proven ability to facilitate design sprints and collaborative ideation sessions.
- Proven track record of applying design and systems thinking frameworks.
