Instacart invites you to share love through food by ensuring everyone has access to the food they love. We’re looking for a Product Designer who is design-first with a technical lean to lead our design system. You will own it as a product, driving its quality, usability, scalability, and adoption.

What You'll Do

Drive the design system roadmap, prioritizing based on product needs, system health, and adoption friction.
Define and evolve component and pattern UX: anatomy, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults.
Lead token strategy (primitive + semantic) for 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 (not just visuals): edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria.
Collaborate with Design Technologists to translate system guidance into in-tool guardrails (linting, templates, plugin experiences).
Help define the system’s structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, do/don’t, examples) so it can power automation and AI-assisted support.
Identify design enablement workflow opportunities and prioritize enablement opportunities that reduce rework and raise consistency.
Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution.
Use AI tools intentionally to streamline system work (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation, change summaries).
Contribute to AI-assisted workflows that reduce system toil and help teams adopt changes safely.

What We're Looking For

6+ years in product design (or equivalent) with proven experience shipping and maintaining a design system used by multiple teams.
Strong design fundamentals: interaction design, visual systems, hierarchy, and responsive patterns.
Design systems mastery: components, patterns, tokens, governance, adoption, systems-thinking, documentation, and cross-platform consistency.
Technical fluency: able to collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Storybook or equivalent) and understand how implementation constraints shape UX.
Strong accessibility competency applied to systems (WCAG compliance, etc).
Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve speed and quality (not just ideation, real workflow impact).
Experience with token pipelines (CSS variables, semantic token architectures, token tooling).
Experience driving adoption through metrics, migrations, and enablement programs.
Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to Have

Experience working with AI‑assisted coding environments such as Cursor and Claude Code.
Strong foundation in human-centered design thinking methodologies.
Proven ability to facilitate design sprints and collaborative ideation sessions.
Proven ability to empathize and balance needs of multiple (internal and external) users, define problems, ideate solutions, prototype concepts, and test iteratively.
Proven track record of applying design and systems thinking frameworks to drive innovation and solve challenging problems.