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Render is seeking a Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead to build the foundational design system for a modern cloud platform serving developers building AI-native applications. This is a founding role that starts hands-on and grows into team leadership.
The Role
You'll set the vision and direction for Render's design system, deciding what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on builder and customer needs. Early on, you'll do much of the foundational work yourself: architecting the system, shipping components, writing guidance, and establishing quality standards. As the function grows, you'll hire, develop, and lead a team around design systems.
Key Responsibilities
- Set system vision and direction; build foundations hands-on (architecture, components, guidance, quality bar)
- Build and lead the design systems team as it grows; hire, develop, set priorities, and maintain high standards
- Elevate Render's visual and interaction design across typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, and accessibility
- Make the system legible to AI, not just humans: machine-readable documentation, system rules exposed via APIs (e.g., MCP), architecture that keeps brand and accessibility layers ours
- Guide technical architecture with engineering; shape components, tokens, and how agents discover and validate guidance
- Define and measure quality, including AI-generated output, through repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks
- Drive adoption by working alongside product teams, teaching through examples, and turning recurring questions into improvements
- Experiment as AI tools and models evolve; share learnings and adjust direction based on evidence
What Makes This Urgent
Render's users are developers increasingly building with AI agents. Inside Render, teams reach for agents before checking docs—so a system not legible to AI gets bypassed and quality drifts. Externally, Render is the platform where developers deploy AI-native apps. This role treats the design system as infrastructure for humans, machines, and velocity, with a point of view on what that requires: machine-readable docs, system rules exposed where agents can read them, architecture that preserves brand and accessibility, and evaluations that catch drift before shipping.
Requirements
- Track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering; appetite to build a function from the ground up before leading a team. You create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and maintain momentum without dropping quality. Experience leading or developing designers/design engineers is a strong plus.
- Exceptional visual and interaction design skills. Your work shows clear point of view, obsessive detail, and ability to make complex experiences feel simple—work other practitioners admire.
- Deep systems thinking and experience building systems other teams actually adopt. You can demonstrate how your work improved both their speed and quality of shipped output.
- Strong technical fluency. You can prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture (component API design, tokens, theming, layered/headless patterns), and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers.
- Hands-on use of AI in your work and a real point of view on AI-ready design systems. You understand where AI helps and fails, how to improve its output, and what it takes for a system to serve machines as well as humans. You should be able to articulate where you'd start and why.
- Strong product judgment and developer empathy. You stay close to users, connect system decisions to real workflows and outcomes. Fluency with developers and technical products is a strong plus.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is competitive advantage
- Hands-on experience making a design system AI-ready (machine-readable docs, MCP or similar agent access, layered/headless architecture, evaluation frameworks)
- Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams' daily workflow
- Experience leading major design-system migration or company-wide change in how teams build
- Experience evolving a system across platforms or connecting product and brand experiences
- Founder or early-stage startup experience
