Product Designer, Design Systems

About Clay

Clay is a creative tool for growth. Our mission is to help businesses grow— without huge investments in tooling or manual labor. We’re already helping over 100,000 people grow their business with Clay. From local pizza shops to enterprises like Anthropic and Notion, our tool lets you instantly translate any idea that you have for growing your company into reality.

We believe that modern GTM teams win by finding GTM alpha—a unique competitive edge powered by data, experimentation, and automation. Clay is the platform they use to uncover hidden signals, build custom plays, and launch faster than their competitors. We’re looking for sharp, low-ego people to help teams find their GTM alpha.

Why is Clay the best place to work in New York?

• Customers love the product (100K+ users and growing)

• We’re growing a lot (6x YoY last year, and 10x YoY the two years before that)

• Incredible culture (our customers keep applying to work here)

• In-person work (beautiful office space in Flatiron)

• Well-resourced (raised a Series B expansion in January 2025 from investors like Sequoia and Meritech)

Read more about why people love working at Clay here and explore our wall of love to learn more about the product.

Product Designer, Design Systems @ Clay

We're looking for a Product Designer to lead the design system that powers every surface of our product. As our sole designer for our design system, you'll architect the foundations that enable our product teams to move faster, more consistently, and with greater quality. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role — part design craft, part systems strategy, part cultural stewardship. You’ll work side-by-side with designers, engineers, product teams to shape not just our UI, but how design works at scale. If you’re excited about balancing rigor and flexibility, designing for designers and developers, and building durable systems in a fast-moving org — this role is for you.

Questions We're Asking & Exploring

• How do we evolve our system to support new products and patterns without breaking existing ones?

• How do we create a system that designers and developers love to use — and want to contribute to?

• How do we drive adoption and alignment across teams without becoming a bottleneck or bureaucracy?

• How can our design system not just enable execution, but elevate product thinking, innovation, and delight?

What You’ll Do

• Own and evolve Clay’s design system: Define, build, and maintain the design tokens, components, and patterns that scale across the product.

• Design for designers and developers: Ensure the system is not only visually consistent but usable, extensible, and performant across roles.

• Drive adoption and alignment: Collaborate across design, engineering, and product to ensure the system supports real use cases — and is used with intent.

• Create clarity through documentation: Author clear usage guidelines, rationale, and technical considerations that empower others to design and build with confidence.

• Partner deeply with engineering: Work side-by-side with frontend engineers to ensure implementation fidelity, accessibility, and scalability.

• Build governance and contribution models: Set up scalable processes for contribution, change management, and versioning.

• Champion accessibility and quality: Ensure our foundations meet high standards of usability, performance, and inclusivity.

• Be a multiplier for the design team: Enable product designers to spend less time reinventing the wheel — and more time solving the right problems.

What You’ll Bring

• 7+ years of product design experience, including significant time owning or contributing to a design system at scale

• Fluency in Figma, tokens, component libraries, and best practices for cross-browser UI systems

• Deep understanding of visual design, interaction patterns, accessibility, and UI architecture

• Strong collaboration skills with engineers — you know how components get built, and you design with implementation in mind

• Experience writing documentation, teaching systems usage, and driving adoption through influence

• Strategic thinking: You understand how systems work can unlock speed, consistency, and quality across an organization

• Excitement for early-stage environments where you can help set direction, not just execute on it

• Bonus: Experience with motion, prototyping, or development

Life @ Clay 

Based out of a central office on 19th Street in Manhattan's Flatiron District. We love the energy of in-person collaboration while also offering the flexibility to work from home when needed.

• Competitive salary and role trajectory: Roles, responsibilities, and comp grow as we do.

• Health Insurance: Fully covered, high-quality medical, dental, and vision plans for NYC Claymates. Includes options covering 70–80% of out-of-network therapy after a deductible is met. Insurance options for remote Claymates may vary by location.

• Visa sponsorship: Visa sponsorship for US-based candidates (e.g., student to work visas). We get it - it's an arduous process, but we're not scared of it. Sponsorship for candidates outside of the US may vary.

• Paid time off: We expect team members to take at least 3 weeks fully-disconnected per year, with a flexible vacation policy beyond that.

• Free food: Free meals in office every day and unlimited snacks.

• Parental leave & fertility support: IVF fertility benefits, egg freezing, and 4 months of paid parental leave for NYC Claymates. Support for remote Claymates may vary by location.

Learn more about Clay and what it’s like to work with us right here!

Compensation