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.
Technical Stack
- Storybook
- AI/automation tools
- Token tooling
- AI-assisted coding environments (Cursor, Claude Code)
Benefits & Compensation
- $171,000 — $180,500 CAD + equity
- New hire equity grant and annual refresh grants
Work Mode
This is a remote position open to candidates in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
Instacart is an equal opportunity employer.
