Role Summary

What You’ll Do

Design Platform & System Leadership

• Own and evolve the Upshop Design Platform and System: components, guidelines, interaction language, motion principles, and shared patterns.
• Partner with engineering to ensure consistency, scalability, performance, and technical feasibility at platform scale.
• Define and document standards for how design is expressed across products — from tokens to complex state behaviors.
• Advocate for accessibility, performance, and inclusive design across the system.

Hands-On UX & Interaction Craft

• Create and iterate high-fidelity prototypes, interaction models, and design artifacts that clarify intent and drive alignment.
• Use prototypes as a primary language for exploration, communication, and decision-making.
• Translate research insights, user data, and business goals into elegant, scalable solutions.

Player-Coach Leadership

• Serve as a mentor and coach: provide regular design critique, career guidance, and hands-on support for more junior designers.
• Lead and facilitate cross-disciplinary workshops to solve complex UX challenges collaboratively.
• Elevate team craft through shared best practices, tooling improvements, and patterns for reuse.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, and Brand teams to shape outcomes that balance user needs with business strategy.
• Influence product direction through strategic reasoning and exceptional design judgment.
• Represent design decisions to senior leadership and stakeholders with clarity and confidence.

Working in Ambiguity & Evolving Practice

• Thrive in exploratory environments where problems are undefined and outcomes are emerging.
• Define and refine processes that help teams navigate ambiguity while maintaining velocity and quality.

Qualifications

• Experience 7+ years of UX / product design experience with a strong portfolio of work that demonstrates both strategic depth and craft excellence.
• Experience creating and scaling design systems or shared UX platforms in complex multi-product portfolios across different medium (web, tablet, mobile).
• Proven track record of mentoring designers and elevating team quality.

Skills & Expertise

• Hands-on design fluency: end-to-end interaction design, advanced prototyping (Figma), motion where applicable.
• Deep systems thinking: ability to decompose and organize design patterns that scale across products and teams.
• Excellent communication: ability to articulate decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort working with engineering on implementation patterns, constraints, and performance realities.
• Strong understanding of user-centered design, accessibility, and usability best practices.
• Experience contributing code to UI component libraries: React, Tailwind, Design Tokens, shadcn, CSS-in-JS; able to meaningfully engage on component structure and implementation quality.
• Familiarity with analytics data used to inform design decisions.
• Experience in high-growth SaaS or platform organizations.

What Makes You Successful Here

• You set direction through clarity of thought and strength of craft, not hierarchy.
• You enjoy making complexity feel simple for others - both in product and in how design works.
• You are motivated by empowering others, sharing craft expertise, and defining scalable design strategies.
• You embrace ambiguity and drive forward with both curiosity and discipline.

Portfolio Requirement

• Design system thinking and platform-level impact
• High-fidelity prototypes and interaction work
• Examples of coaching, mentoring, or elevating team outcomes