We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Overview
Instacart’s Design Systems & Foundations team builds the shared components, tokens, and guidance that power customer, shopper, retailer, and internal tools at scale. We’re looking for a design-first, technically fluent product designer to lead the evolution of our design system as a product—raising quality, usability, scalability, and adoption across multiple product surfaces.
In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineering and design technologists to ensure design-to-code fidelity, integrate guidance directly inside design and development workflows, and shape a durable “source of truth” that can power automation, guardrails, and AI-assisted workflows. You’ll collaborate with an 8-person foundations team and cross-functional partners to unlock velocity and consistency for product teams serving millions of customers.
About the Job
- Own and drive the design system roadmap—prioritizing by product needs, system health, and adoption friction—while aligning stakeholders on a clear, forward-looking vision.
- Define and evolve system UX: components, patterns, interaction states, responsive behavior, motion, and accessibility defaults that scale across products and platforms.
- Lead token strategy end to end (primitive and semantic), including theming, density, and extensibility, and partner with engineering to maintain consistent component APIs.
- Establish strong governance and lifecycle management: contribution standards, quality bars, review processes, versioning, deprecations, and clear migration plans to reduce system drift.
- Create implementation-aware specs with edge cases, constraints, usage guidance, and acceptance criteria; collaborate in component-based workflows (e.g., Figma libraries, Storybook) to ensure design-to-code fidelity.
- Build design enablement in context—linting rules, templates, and plugin experiences—supported by a structured knowledge model (rules, constraints, examples) that powers automation and AI-assisted support.
- Use AI tools intentionally to streamline audits, consistency checks, migrations, and spec generation; contribute to AI-assisted workflows that help teams adopt changes safely.
- Measure adoption and impact, identify workflow friction, and execute enablement programs that reduce rework, raise consistency, and accelerate safe system evolution.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 6+ years of experience in product design (or equivalent), including shipping and maintaining a design system adopted by multiple product teams.
- Portfolio showcasing design systems mastery (components, patterns, tokens, governance) and cross-platform consistency; portfolio link required.
- Technical fluency collaborating in component-based workflows (e.g., Figma component libraries and Storybook or equivalent) with a strong understanding of how implementation constraints shape UX.
- Hands-on experience with token pipelines and tooling (e.g., CSS variables, semantic token architectures) and writing implementation-aware specs with acceptance criteria.
- Proven accessibility competency applied to systems (e.g., WCAG 2.1 AA) with accessible defaults and patterns.
- Demonstrated use of AI/automation to improve delivery speed and quality for design systems (e.g., audits, migration planning, consistency checks, spec generation).
- Experience driving system adoption through metrics, deprecation/migration programs, and cross-functional enablement.
- Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with AI-assisted coding and design environments (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and building Figma plugins or linting/guardrail tooling.
- Track record implementing scalable theming, density, and semantic token strategies across multiple products or platforms.
- Experience facilitating design sprints, co-creation workshops, or component governance reviews with cross-functional stakeholders.
- Data fluency leveraging telemetry, adoption metrics, and experiments to inform system roadmap and deprecation strategies.
- Familiarity with versioned monorepos or multi-package design system releases, including change management and migration planning.
#LI-Remote
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.