Design Systems Lead

Role: Design Systems Lead

Lead the strategy, roadmap, and execution of Imprint’s design system, ensuring it scales across product teams and evolves toward machine-readable, AI-consumable foundations.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term design system vision and roadmap, balancing near-term product needs with long-term platform investment.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product Design, Engineering, Product Management, and AI teams to ensure components are scalable, maintainable, production-ready, and aligned to shared priorities.
• Establish governance: contribution models and decision-making frameworks so teams have a shared source of truth.
• Evolve the system beyond traditional libraries/docs (e.g., Figma libraries and Storybook) toward machine-readable, AI-consumable foundations that connect design tooling, code generation, and AI-assisted development.
• Mentor and lead a small team of design systems designers; raise the bar on systems thinking, prioritization, and ownership.
• Stay hands-on by contributing to component architecture, documentation, patterns, and guidelines; lead complex initiatives from strategy through execution.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of product design experience, including significant design systems ownership and experience leading/managing design systems teams.
• Proven success building and scaling design systems adopted across multiple product teams in production.
• Strong understanding of component architecture, design tokens, accessibility standards, and design-to-development workflows.
• Product judgment to prioritize high-impact work and make tradeoffs between near-term needs and long-term system investments.
• Experience partnering with frontend engineers and engineering leadership to ship components that are adopted and trusted.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-moving startup environment where you own both strategy and execution.
• Strong communication and influence across functions, including educating teams new to design systems.

Nice to Have

• Experience with modern frontend technologies and component-based development; Storybook and design token infrastructure.
• Experience with AI-assisted design, code generation, or agent-driven workflows (especially exploring AI’s impact on design and build processes).
• Background in design engineering or other highly technical product environments.
• Experience scaling design systems in high-growth startups where the system must evolve alongside rapid product expansion.