UX: Staff Product Designer, Design Systems - Visual

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a UX: Staff Product Designer, Design Systems - Visual based in United States.

This is a foundational Staff Product Design role focused on shaping the visual language and token architecture of an enterprise-scale design system. You will own the design decisions that influence components, patterns, and product experiences across a broad, multi-product ecosystem. The role combines deep visual craft with systems thinking, requiring you to balance flexibility, consistency, scalability, and implementation realities. You will help evolve the system for multi-theme, dark mode, density scaling, and AI-generated product experiences. You will also play a key role in making design systems increasingly machine-readable for AI coding tools, MCP integrations, and generative UI workflows. Working closely with designers, engineers, product teams, and leadership, you will establish standards and principles that enable teams to move faster without compromising quality. This is an opportunity to influence design infrastructure at significant scale while serving as a trusted visual quality bar and design systems thought leader.

Accountabilities:
- Own and evolve a three-tier design token architecture spanning global, semantic, and component-specific tokens, ensuring it can support multi-theme, multi-platform, and multi-density requirements.

- Make and communicate architectural decisions around token naming, tier boundaries, semantic abstraction, flexibility, constraints, and long-term scalability.

- Lead safe token migration strategies that minimize disruption for downstream teams and establish governance practices that keep consuming teams aligned.

- Own the system-level visual language across color, typography, spacing, iconography, and motion, ensuring product experiences remain cohesive and distinctive.

- Serve as the final visual quality bar for the design system, evaluating visual direction and resolving disagreements through clear principles, strong craft, and evidence.

- Develop design principles and tenets that help designers make consistent visual decisions without requiring extensive alignment for every choice.

- Lead initiatives to make the token layer machine-readable, including structuring token names and documentation for AI coding tools, MCP integrations, and generative UI systems.

- Partner with product teams across the organization as an authority on tokens and visual language, helping teams use the system effectively while identifying friction that should inform future evolution.

- Collaborate closely with engineers to maintain implementation fidelity, understand technical constraints, and advocate credibly for design intent.

- Contribute to design-system governance, including contribution reviews, quality standards, and policies that prevent token drift across the product platform.

- Provide Staff-level leadership across multiple projects, identifying high-impact problems, developing solutions, and driving initiatives through to completion with a high degree of autonomy.

Requirements

- Demonstrated hands-on ownership of a multi-tier token architecture at enterprise scale, ideally within a multi-product or multi-platform environment.

- Proven experience making consequential token architecture decisions involving naming conventions, tier structures, semantic abstraction, and breaking-change management.

- Expert-level visual design craft with a systems-oriented understanding of color, typography, spacing, iconography, and motion as interconnected elements of a unified visual language.

- Experience evolving a mature design language while balancing brand evolution, system consistency, scalability, and stakeholder needs.

- A portfolio demonstrating high-quality visual product outcomes resulting from design-system and token work, not only technically sound architecture.

- Ability to estab