Senior Design System Manager

OVERVIEW

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries—it’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. 

Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

ABOUT THE ROLE 

As the Senior Design System Manager, you will partner with our Product and Engineering leads to drive the strategy and vision for IDS—the Instacart Design System—working closely with leaders across the organization to shape it toward the greatest impact for our different audiences and businesses. You’ll also be responsible for leading our cross-functional team of over 12 professionals while managing 4 designers.

We need someone who loves the challenge of creating high-quality work within a fast-paced, ever-evolving technology company. You know what it takes to keep a team inspired, motivated and focused on doing their best work, and able to see how their individual contributions connect to the bigger picture—end users and the company. 

You know that our success hinges upon the success of the team so you’re passionate and proactive about encouraging them, coaching them, and offering candid feedback. 

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Instacart Design & Research team is an empowered team that aims to craft engaging, cohesive, and inspirational experiences for everyone. Our mission is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. 

The IDS Team is a highly collaborative cross-functional team that's well positioned in the organization—and enjoys having fun while driving impact. As a Senior Design System Manager you will work closely with product, design, creative, and engineering partners across the org to continue co-creating a robust, reliable, and scalable design system that everyone loves.

ABOUT THE JOB

We’re looking for a leader who will help mature and scale IDS Pantry, our emerging visual language and design system for all Instacart products and platforms—consumer, shopper, retailer and CPG facing. 

We see design systems as just one element of the broader organizational system, so understanding that context is essential to finding integral solutions centered around the needs of our end users and internal teams, so we're looking for a leader excited to put their needs first. 

As a craft leader you'll be responsible for driving the strategy and vision, as well as supporting and pushing the quality of day-to-day design, implementation, and how we roll out the design system. 

To be successful, you will have to balance two key sides of this role: building strong partnerships with key stakeholders while shipping world-class systems design work. 

ABOUT YOU

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of experience in digital product design
• 3+ years of experience leading design system teams, crafting Figma libraries and rolling out design tokens
• Pride yourself on unparalleled collaboration and communication skills and you look forward to partnering with PMs, engineers, designers to create beautiful—aesthetically pleasing and highly usable—products in a fast-paced, constantly evolving environment
• Systems thinking mindset to design solutions that scale during the product development cycle while being thorough and attentive to detail—from user-centered narratives to user flows to UI interactions all the way to pixel-perfect execution in the product
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to communicate and present ideas clearly and influence key stakeholders at all levels of the organization
• Proved experience creating accessible experiences and good understanding of WCAG standards
• Familiarity with front-end programming—web frameworks and native mobile languages
• Reliable self-starter who can provide strong leadership to multiple projects with minimal oversight
• Embrace constructive feedback as part of the iterative design process and can clearly articulate strong rationale behind your design decisions
• You are comfortable and always willing to roll up your sleeves and chip in to help move a project forward—you like to move quickly and drive towards impact

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• • Experience in brand design
  • Experience with motion design and animation
  • Experience building plugins for Sketch or Figma

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