Senior Designer Technologist, Design Systems

Overview

Instacart’s Design Systems & Foundations team builds the shared components, tokens, guardrails, and guidance that power customer, shopper, retailer, and internal tools at scale. We’re looking for a Design Technologist who thrives at the intersection of design and engineering—someone equally motivated to elevate design craft and to build the technical capabilities that make high‑quality UI faster and easier to produce across a multi‑product ecosystem.

This role sits within the Design organization and supports a multi‑sided marketplace, where consistency, speed, and quality matter across multiple user types and product surfaces. You’ll partner closely with product designers, design systems designers, and front‑end engineers to strengthen our systems ecosystem, reduce drift, and embed guidance directly into the tools and workflows teams already use.

You’ll join a design‑first, technically fluent team that pairs mature governance (versioning, deprecations, migrations) with strong engineering partnerships and pragmatic automation. If you’re energized by rolling up your sleeves, instrumenting impact, and using AI‑assisted workflows to eliminate toil—while upholding high standards for quality, accessibility, and security—this role is for you.

About the Job

• Own and improve core system infrastructure including repositories, publishing workflows, and component playgrounds/environments (e.g., Storybook or equivalent).
• Evolve token workflows (semantic and primitive), theming strategies, and reliable distribution of tokens into product codebases.
• Reduce system drift by strengthening design‑to‑code feedback loops, improving contribution workflows, and embedding guardrails where work happens.
• Contribute to component implementations with an emphasis on maintainable patterns, scalable architecture, accessibility defaults, and cross‑platform consistency.
• Build internal tools that enable faster, more consistent delivery: Figma plugins/scripts, generators/scaffolding for system‑aligned components, and PR/CI checks, lint rules, and automated quality gates.
• Model system guidance in structured, reusable formats (rules, constraints, mappings, examples) to power checks, in‑tool guidance, and automation.
• Instrument and iterate: measure adoption and quality, identify recurring sources of rework, and evolve tooling and standards based on real‑world usage.
• Use AI‑assisted workflows to accelerate audits, migrations, and repetitive tasks (e.g., script generation, change summaries, automated fixes) with strong review, security, and quality practices.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience across product design and/or front‑end engineering, including shipping and maintaining a design system adopted by multiple product teams.
• Portfolio demonstrating design systems mastery (components, patterns, tokens, governance) and cross‑platform consistency; portfolio link required.
• Advanced proficiency in TypeScript/JavaScript and a modern front‑end framework (React or similar).
• Proven experience delivering internal tools (e.g., Figma plugins, scripts, CLIs, CI automations) with testing, maintainability, and observability where appropriate.
• Fluency in Figma at a systems level: component architecture, variants/props strategy, naming conventions, library structure, and publishing/versioning.
• Strong understanding of design tokens (semantic vs. primitive), theming/density, and mapping token decisions to UI intent.
• Demonstrated ability to reason about component UX—including anatomy, states, edge cases, responsive behavior, motion—and to establish accessibility defaults.
• Hands‑on experience working in shared component codebases/monorepos with multi‑team contribution models.
• Demonstrated use of AI‑assisted development or design workflows to reduce toil and accelerate delivery with appropriate judgment, review, and security considerations.
• Experience driving system adoption through metrics, deprecation/migration programs, and cross‑functional enablement.
• Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing and shipping Figma plugins.
• Experience with AI‑assisted coding environments (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and prompt‑driven automation.
• Familiarity with token pipelines and tooling (e.g., CSS variables, semantic token architectures, Style Dictionary or equivalent).
• Experience with Storybook (or equivalent) and docs/playground infrastructure.
• Experience with visual regression testing and UI QA automation.
• Deep accessibility expertise applied through scalable guardrails, linters, and automation.
• Experience with native UI frameworks (SwiftUI and/or Jetpack Compose) and cross‑platform design enablement.
• Fluency across end‑to‑end product design processes—from discovery and ideation through prototyping and validation.

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