Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead

Responsibilities

• Set the system's vision and direction. Decide what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on what builders and customers need — and turn that into focused work, much of which you'll do yourself at first.
• Build the foundations hands-on. Early on, you are the team: setting the architecture, shipping the components, writing the guidance, and establishing the quality bar through your own work before there's anyone to delegate to.
• Build and lead the team that owns the system. As the function grows, hire and develop it — set priorities and ownership, give direct feedback, hold a high bar, and help people do the best work of their careers.
• Elevate Render's visual and interaction design. Raise the bar for typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility — and the states beyond the happy path, which is where developer tools earn their reputation.
• Make the system legible to AI, not just humans.
• Lead the work to make Render's design system AI-ready: machine-readable documentation, system rules and tokens exposed where agents can reach them (e.g. via MCP), and an architecture that shrinks the context an agent needs while keeping the brand and accessibility layers ours. The goal: agents building on Render…
• Guide technical architecture with engineering. Shape everything from components and tokens to how agents discover guidance and check their work. Make sound tradeoffs between flexibility, coherence, performance, and ease of use — layered and headless where that scales better than rigid bundles.
• Define and measure quality, including AI output.
• Build repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks — testing generated output against the system's standard, not just whether people use the tools.
• Earn adoption. Work alongside product teams, teach through examples, and turn recurring questions and exceptions into improvements. A system lives or dies on whether people, and their agents, reach for it.

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