Sr. Staff Product Designer

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.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We’re a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

The Instacart design team focuses on designing, building & landing multi-platform product experiences that make grocery shopping effortless and create economic opportunity for our shoppers. The team crafts solutions for large-scale challenges that will change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. 

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Sr Staff Product Designer is our highest craft role on the Core Experience design team.  You will serve as a design lead and direct multiple design disciplines to deliver exceptional experiences for our consumers with a heavy bias toward visual design language, branded interfaces, and scalable interaction patterns that evolve a design system. Day to day you will define design briefs, create strategic frameworks that solve user needs, set structure for project plans and process, shape and design digital experiences with product and content designers, and direct research to generate user insights that influence what we ship into the market. You will have the opportunity to work on a variety of briefs that might focus on: new growth concepts for gen z, multi-person shopping, or core shopping flows that drive critical performance for our Instacart Marketplace and retailer sites. And as a general standard for all our designers and leaders, we are looking for people who love building design culture, can instill incredibly supportive ways of working, enjoy mentoring designers and will push for the highest quality of craft in everything we ship. 

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional experience in consumer-facing digital product design, as evidenced by an exceptional portfolio showcasing expertise in visual design, interaction design, and product design language development. 
• Deep experience in creating visual centers, identities, and interfaces that evolve a product experience and draw strong connections to a cohesive brand and product relationship.
• Proven ability to set highly inclusive, experimental, nurturing and encouraging design rituals for a project team.
• Experience working with/on brand design and marketing teams to build cohesive and brand defining interactions inside digital products.  
• Undeniable ability to inspire and provoke new thinking that catalyze product partners, engineers and designers on your respective teams.
• Proven experience tackling both functional and visionary design challenges with an approach that presents a range of mild to wild options that solve the presenting problem statement.
• Can influence and shape the evolution of digital product design language with an ability to manage system design, visual interfaces and the expression of the brand through differentiated identities and sensibilities.
• Skilled in shaping voice/tone strategy and mentoring teams to align content and research with product vision and the Instacart brand.
• Strong ability to inspire and sell-in your work through polished presentation design, prototypes, storytelling, and explicit connection to larger business strategies/stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of how to develop design work through explorations, functional (AI prototyping) concept development and creative directions that draft off a core brand design system.
• Proven success with taking calculated risks on new concepts - pushing against conventions and leaning into emerging interactions all while improving the performance of our product experience.
• Enjoys leading designers by example and serving as both a mentor and model for the highest bar of craft.
• Comfortable working on projects that start with some ambiguity and require greater clarity, definition, and strategic purpose in the work.
• Possess deep curiosity, comfort, and basic competence with emerging AI prototyping tools that accelerate concept explorations and path to development.

Preferred Qualifications

• You love to study and design for consumer behaviors with a specific interest in consumerism, retail, nutrition, food and evolving cultural norms.
• You believe in the power of brand, a well-articulated point of view, and the necessity of driving measurable business outcomes.
• A deep love and bias for designing products that blend interaction design with brand identity, visual design language and content design.
• You are very comfortable directing and tuning every aspect of a digital experience including: visual, motion, content, system, and interactive design.
• Comfort with AI-driven prototyping workflow: From generating UI in Figma Make to using IDE environments (Cursor, XCode) to generate native iOS code (SwiftUI, React, similar frameworks)
• Ability to translate design intent into functional prototypes that integrate real data, interactions, and design system components.
• Strong problem-solving mindset: using AI tools creatively to explore multiple solutions quickly, validate ideas with stakeholders, and refine outputs for production handoff.