Design Systems Lead

Join Perplexity as a Design Systems Lead, where you'll own and bootstrap an intuitive semantic token system that supports design and product teams across multiple platforms and frameworks. This role is a true 50/50 design-engineer position, requiring fluency in both Figma and GitHub. You'll work at the intersection of design and engineering, partnering with product feature teams across mobile, web, and React surfaces. Your responsibilities will include maintaining the design system repo, setting high visual design quality standards, and ensuring accessibility and theming are baked in as defaults.

• Bootstrap and own an intuitive semantic token system that works across multiple platforms and frameworks, ensuring coherence as the product scales.
• Own the design system repo on GitHub, managing versioning, release management, and a clear changelog while setting and upholding high visual design quality standards.
• Define and run the contribution model and governance for the design system, reviewing and shepherding inbound contributions from product feature teams.
• A track record of driving adoption through excellent documentation and cross-functional partnership
• Readiness to work with new AI tooling and genuine comfort with ambiguity
• Fluency in Figma, but primarily living in GitHub where you own the repo
• Deep understanding of the nuanced differences between mobile, web, and React UI best practices
• Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and how to build them into a system
• An impeccable eye for visual design
• A true 50/50 design-engineer, equally credible in visual craft and in code
• Experience designing and maintaining semantic design tokens and scalable component APIs
• Extensive experience owning design systems at large organizations
• Strong product sensibilities to help evaluate and integrate contributions from various product feature teams
• Experience building a semantic token system from scratch across multiple platforms
• Experience defining contribution models and governance for multi-team design systems
• A track record scaling a design system through a period of fast org growth
• Familiarity with component tooling and documentation platforms (e.g., Storybook)
• Experience mentoring designers and engineers and growing a design systems practice