Design Systems Lead

Role Overview

Lead and evolve Imprint’s long-term design system vision, ensuring it scales across products while balancing immediate needs with long-term platform investment.

Responsibilities

• Own the design system roadmap and vision, aligning near-term product requirements with long-term system investments.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product Design, Engineering, Product Management, and AI teams to deliver components that are scalable, maintainable, production-ready, and aligned to shared priorities.
• Establish governance and contribution models, including decision-making frameworks that enable teams to move faster with a shared source of truth.
• Evolve the design system beyond traditional Figma libraries and documentation (e.g., Storybook) toward machine-readable, AI-consumable foundations that connect design tooling, code generation, and AI-assisted development.
• Mentor a small team of design systems designers; raise the bar on systems thinking, prioritization, and ownership.
• Stay hands-on: contribute to component architecture, documentation, reusable patterns, guidelines, and lead complex initiatives from strategy through execution.

Requirements

• 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 used by multiple product teams in production.
• Strong understanding of component architecture, design tokens, accessibility standards, and design-to-development workflows.
• Strong product judgment to prioritize high-impact work and make tradeoffs between near-term needs and long-term investments.
• Experience partnering with frontend engineers and engineering leadership to ship system components that are actually adopted.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup environment where you own both strategy and execution and continuously evolve the system.
• Ability to communicate and influence across functions, including educating/advocating for design systems with teams new to them.

Nice to Have

• Experience with modern frontend/component development, Storybook, and design token infrastructure.
• Experience with AI-assisted design, code generation, or agent-driven workflows (especially exploring how AI changes design/build processes).
• Background in design engineering or highly technical product environments where design and development overlap.
• Experience scaling design systems in high-growth startups.