Lead Product Designer, Design Systems

The Lead Product Designer for the Design System team is responsible for shaping, evolving, and scaling the organization's design system across products, teams, and platforms. This role requires a strong systems thinker with hands-on experience designing, maintaining, and governing design systems that improve product quality, consistency, accessibility, delivery speed, and product innovation.

As a Lead IC on the Design System team, you will act as a force multiplier across the product organization. You will define reusable components, patterns, guidelines, frameworks, and AI-enabled workflows that help designers and engineers build cohesive, high-quality customer experiences more efficiently. You will partner closely with product designers, engineers, product managers, and senior leaders to identify systemic gaps, improve adoption, reduce design and technical debt, and raise the overall quality of our digital experiences.

This role will also help shape how AI is thoughtfully integrated into the design system practice. You will explore opportunities to use AI to accelerate documentation, improve component guidance, identify pattern inconsistencies, support design QA, surface accessibility risks, and help teams make better system-aligned decisions. You should be comfortable experimenting with emerging tools while applying strong judgment around quality, usability, governance, and responsible adoption.

This role is ideal for someone who can zoom out to shape the broader system while also zooming in on the details of component behavior, interaction patterns, documentation, accessibility, and implementation quality. The right person will bring curiosity and practical experimentation to the future of design systems, helping the organization understand where AI can meaningfully improve how teams design, build, maintain, and scale product experiences.

What You'll Do

• Design System Leadership: Drive the strategic evolution of the design system by defining high-impact components and patterns. Lead the development of UI and UX design best practices, templates and trainings to increase design knowledge and standards for the organization.
• Execution & Craft: Ensure coherence across experiences and systems. Create user-centered product designs, requirements, workflows and strategies. Create low- and high-fidelity prototypes to communicate design intent. Set quality standards and raise the bar across the domain.
• Strategic Vision & Ownership: Shape problem spaces across initiatives or teams. Connect design work to strategy and customer needs. Identify systemic gaps and proactively find solutions. Recommend metrics to define, manage and measure design success and prioritize enhancements.
• Cross-Organizational Influence: Advise senior leaders on UI and UX initiatives and strategies. Influence senior and VP-level stakeholders through synthesis and clarity. Align teams around a shared direction and narrative.
• Mentorship & Community: Coach other designers through complex stakeholder environments to align decisions with business goals. Collaborate with leadership to support team member onboarding and growth. Mentor product and engineering peers on user-centric thinking.

• Experience & Impact: 5 or more years of progressive experience in Product Design, UX Design, Interaction Design, or Design Systems, with direct experience contributing to or leading a design system.
• Strategic Depth: Demonstrated experience shaping and driving the design system strategy across multiple initiatives, solving foundational problems that elevate the overall product experience and empower feature teams.
• Portfolio Excellence: A strong portfolio showcasing mastery across the entire design process, with an emphasis on visual craft, systemic thinking, component architecture, and data-informed strategy.
• Technical Fluency: Deep understanding of modern software development, technical constraints, and front-end capabilities, enabling you to partner effectively with engineering teams to bridge the gap between design and code.
• Influence and Communication: Exceptional ability to articulate complex design system concepts, usage guidelines, and trade-offs to cross-functional teams and senior leadership.
• Adaptability: Proven ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and confidently lead design system efforts with minimal managerial oversight.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Experience coaching and guiding peers, elevating the quality of design output, and driving the adoption of system best practices across the broader organization.
• Domain Focus: Deep expertise in designing, maintaining, and governing component libraries for SaaS platforms, with a clear understanding of accessibility standards, cross-platform consistency, and system adoption metrics.
• AI/Future-Forward Design: Familiarity with Generative AI tools and processes used to rapidly iterate on concepts, system documentation, and component variations. Experience leveraging data and user feedback to expedite data-driven design system decisions.

The specific salary offered to a candidate may be influenced by a variety of factors including the candidate's experience, their education and work location. In addition, some roles may be eligible for additional on target commission pay or bonus. The compensation package includes health and welfare benefits including paid leave. Pay Transparency - All Full Time Employees $127,600-$159,500 USD

Why You'll Love Us:

• We celebrate one another's differences. We are proud of our culture of diversity and inclusion, and we're always working hard to strengthen and improve this culture. We have programs in place that bring us together on important issues and provide educational opportunities for all employees.
• Join the experts. If you're passionate about supporting businesses and organizations, you won't find a better spot to share your talent. We're dedicated to improving the quality of our product from a customer standpoint and have a true desire to enable the success of businesses, non-profit organizations, and community groups.
• You'll have opportunities to grow your career. We encourage and support our team members to learn different aspects of the business, take on stretch assignments, seek coaching opportunities and professional development opportunities.
• A generous paid time off policy and a competitive benefits package that supports the health and well-being of you and your family

At Constant Contact, we're all about work flexibility and are proud to serve our customers as a hybrid workforce. Our hybrid work model combines the convenience of remote work with access to our great office locations to collaborate in-person, participate in live trainings, and socialize with colleagues.

At Constant Contact, we are seriously awesome people who take ownership and make an impact by operating with the mindset, integrity and courage of a small business owner.There's something so profoundly rewarding about knowing that your work is empowering people everywhere to pursue their dreams. Here, we all play an integral part in helping business owners, entrepreneurs, non-profits and individuals to succeed by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online. We're energized by new challenges and new possibilities-and we're just getting started!