SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 221,200 - 387,100 / annual
ServiceNow's Product Design team is seeking a Principal Design Technologist to lead the evolution of design systems and AI-assisted design practices. This is a senior individual contributor role within the Design Systems team, which creates shared foundations enabling consistent, accessible, and high-quality product experiences across the platform and business units.
In this role, you will translate design-system standards and design files into clear specifications, coded reference components, validation tools, and implementation guidance. You'll create design-owned coded UI reference libraries (using modern frameworks like Lit and Web Components) that demonstrate component states, interactions, responsive behavior, accessibility expectations, and design tokens. You'll evaluate and create AI-assisted tools that help teams find, apply, and validate design-system guidance, defining practical assessment methods to ensure accuracy and alignment with approved standards.
You will lead design-system adoption across the organization by evaluating emerging AI tools, establishing responsible working practices, and providing playbooks, demonstrations, and workshops. You'll mentor product designers who use code to prototype AI experiences, establish shared working practices, and turn lessons into reusable guidance. You'll partner with front-end engineering teams to identify gaps between approved designs and delivered experiences, creating design-side review and validation methods that surface issues earlier.
Collaboration is central: you'll work with Product Design, Product Management, Engineering, Accessibility, and Design Enablement to set direction for design-system tools and practices. You'll contribute to the contribution process that enables experts across disciplines to propose, review, and maintain design-system guidance. The role leads through expertise and influence; Product and Engineering retain ownership of product strategy, technical architecture, production code, roadmaps, and delivery.
Key responsibilities include creating and maintaining design-owned coded reference libraries, partnering with front-end teams on implementation validation, leading AI tool adoption across Design, mentoring designers using code, and collaborating on contribution processes and engineering adoption.
REQUIREMENTS:
Preferred Qualifications:
- 12+ years of experience in product design, design systems, design technology, prototyping, or related discipline within complex, enterprise-scale products
- Portfolio or body of work demonstrating strong systems thinking, interaction and visual craft, and ability to turn design standards into reusable guidance, reference components, and tools
- Hands-on experience with modern UI frameworks such as Lit and Web Components, with ability to build coded prototypes and design-owned reference components
- Deep knowledge of design systems, including components, patterns, design tokens, themes, accessibility, responsive behavior, localization, governance, and contribution processes
- Experience using AI to improve design work (finding guidance, creating/reviewing content, checking quality, automating tasks) and defining appropriate human review and responsible-use practices
- Experience using or extending design tools such as Figma, documentation platforms, component catalogs, analytics, plugins, or automated design-quality and accessibility checks
- Demonstrated success setting direction and influencing senior partners across Design, Product, Engineering, Accessibility, and AI in complex, distributed organizations
- Excellent communication, facilitation, storytelling, critique, and mentoring skills with record of helping design organizations adopt AI tools, shared standards, and new ways of working
Basic Qualifications:
- Experience contributing throughout the product development process for web or software products
- Experience in user experience design, product design, design systems, design technology, prototyping, or related field
- Experience working with cross-functional teams across Product, Design, Accessibility, and Engineering
