Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead

The role

You will build and lead a design system that serves humans and AI agents. You will set the system vision, build foundations hands-on in code, and eventually hire and lead a team.

What you will do

• Set the system's vision and direction.
• Build the foundations hands-on including architecture, components, and guidance.
• Build and lead the team that owns the system.
• Elevate Render's visual and interaction design.
• Make the system legible to AI through machine-readable documentation and system rules.
• Guide technical architecture with engineering.
• Define and measure quality, including AI output.
• Earn adoption by working alongside product teams.
• Experiment as models and tools evolve.

Required qualifications

• Track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering.
• Appetite to build a function from the ground up before leading a team.
• Exceptional visual and interaction design skills.
• Deep systems thinking and experience building systems other teams adopt.
• Strong technical fluency to prototype and build in code.
• Understand front-end architecture including component API design, tokens, theming, and layered/headless patterns.
• Hands-on use of AI in your work.
• Strong product judgment and developer empathy.

Nice to have

• Experience leading or developing designers/design engineers
• Fluency with developers and technical products
• Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products
• Hands-on experience making a design system AI-ready
• Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams' daily workflow
• Experience leading a major design-system migration or a company-wide change
• Experience evolving a system across platforms, or connecting product and brand experiences
• Founder or early-stage startup experience

Benefits

• 4 weeks of paid vacation
• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans
• 100% employer-paid medical coverage
• 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage
• FSAs and HSAs available
• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy
• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area
• Home office stipends for remote Renders
• Continuous learning benefits & related support

Before you apply

• This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship
• At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers

About the company

Render is building a modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. The platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide.