Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead

Render is building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. The Staff/Principal Founding Design Systems Lead will set the vision for Render's design system, which serves designers, engineers, and AI agents. The role starts hands-on as a designer with technical depth, partners with the Head of Design, and grows into building and leading a team. The role reports to the Head of Design.

Responsibilities

Set the system's vision and direction, deciding what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace; Build the design system foundations hands-on, including architecture, components, guidance, and quality bar; Build and lead the team that owns the system as the function grows, including hiring, priorities, and feedback; Elevate Render's visual and interaction design, including typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility, and non-happy-path states; Make the design system legible to AI through machine-readable documentation, system rules and tokens exposed to agents (e.g. via MCP), and architecture that keeps brand and accessibility layers intact; Guide technical architecture with engineering, including tradeoffs between flexibility, coherence, performance, and ease of use; Define and measure quality, including AI output, through repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks; Earn adoption by working with product teams, teaching through examples, and turning recurring questions and exceptions into improvements; Experiment as models and tools evolve and change direction when evidence calls for it

Requirements

A 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; Ability to create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and keep momentum without dropping the quality bar; Experience leading or developing designers/design engineers (strong plus); Exceptional visual and interaction design skills with a clear point of view and attention to detail; Deep systems thinking and experience building systems other teams actually adopt; Strong technical fluency, including prototyping and building in code, front-end architecture (component API design, tokens, theming, layered/headless patterns), and implementation tradeoffs with engineers; Hands-on use of AI in your work and a real point of view on AI-ready design systems; Strong product judgment and developer empathy; Fluency with developers and technical products (strong plus)

Nice to have

Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage; Hands-on experience making a design system AI-ready (machine-readable documentation, MCP or similar agent access, layered/headless architecture, or evaluation frameworks for AI-generated output); Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams' daily workflow; Experience leading a major design-system migration or a 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

Benefits

4 weeks of paid vacation; 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents; Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans; 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent; FSAs and HSAs available; Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.; Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy; Commuter benefits for Bay Area Renders and home office stipends for remote Renders; Continuous learning benefits and related support