Staff Product Designer (Patterns & Design Innovation)

Role overview

Join Pinterest as a Staff Product Designer focusing on Patterns & Design Innovation. You’ll help shape Pinterest’s next-generation design systems and component libraries through hands-on, horizontal leadership—partnering across product, design, and engineering.

Key missions

• Ensure design system quality: Lead the management, evolution, and adoption of design models, component libraries, and gestalt sub-systems.
• Act as a strategic partner: Collaborate with product, engineering, and design teams to apply best practices.
• Apply systemic approaches: Balance usability, craft, accessibility, and commercial needs.

Responsibilities

• Partner cross-functionally to drive systemic design improvements.
• Prototype and technologize design solutions.
• Uphold and elevate design craft quality.
• Mentor and scale your impact across teams.
• Champion accessibility and inclusion.
• Communicate and influence by synthesizing ambiguity into actionable problems, and by enabling clarity through documentation and collaboration.

Requirements

• Expert-level motion and visual design skills, with strong understanding of how principles affect usability, comprehension, and experience quality (using animation/transitions to clarify, convey emotion, and drive engagement).
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (or equivalent experience).
• Portfolio showing polished interface design, systemic thinking, component-based UIs, and tangible influence across large organizations.
• Demonstrated commitment to inclusion and accessibility.
• Excellent communicator who turns ambiguity into actionable design work and unites teams through clarity and documentation.
• Proven staff/principal-level track record influencing horizontally and partnering cross-functionally (ideally in large-scale consumer or platform environments).
• Growth mindset with passion for learning, experimentation, and mentoring.
• 8+ years of product design experience, with significant time driving/evolving design systems or pattern libraries.

Nice-to-haves

• Design technologist mindset: comfortable experimenting with Figma prototypes, AI, and optionally front-end code; curious and opinionated about technical feasibility and how to streamline design workflows via systems and tools.
• Contributions to public design systems, open-source libraries, or industry talks/writing.
• Familiarity with personalization, large consumer apps, or rapid-scale environments.
• Experience leading platform-wide or multi-product design system initiatives.