[Hiring] Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead @Render

Role Description

We're looking for a Staff/Principal Founding Design Systems Lead to build that judgment into Render's foundations. This isn't about maintaining a component library. It's about enabling designers, engineers, and agents to build experiences that look, feel, and work like Render, without a designer making every decision or the design systems team reviewing every change.

This role starts hands-on. You're a designer first, with the technical depth to get into the code. You'll partner with the Head of Design to set the vision, then do the foundational work yourself:

• Decide where or whether our Figma library lives and how it operates.
• Get deep into what an AI-ready design system really means.
• Prototype, test, and ship the system in code.

As the function grows, you'll build and lead the team around it. You're energized by building from the ground up, not inheriting something finished.

Here's what makes this role urgent and specific to us:

• Our users are developers, and they're increasingly building with AI agents.
• A system that isn't legible to AI quietly gets bypassed, and quality drifts toward generic output.
• We're building the platform where developers deploy AI-native apps and agents.

The person in this role treats the design system as infrastructure for humans, machines, and velocity and has a point of view on what that takes:

• Machine-readable documentation.
• System rules exposed where agents can read them.
• An architecture that keeps the brand and accessibility layers ours.
• Evaluations that catch drift before it ships.

This role reports to the Head of Design.

This role is for you if you're excited by:

• Making great design reproducible, by people and agents.
• Reimagining what a design system can be.
• Building and leading a team that multiplies everyone else's impact.

Qualifications

• A track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering.
• Exceptional visual and interaction design skills.
• Deep systems thinking, and experience building systems other teams actually adopt.
• Strong technical fluency.
• 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.

Requirements

• Experience leading or developing designers/design engineers is a strong plus.
• Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage.
• 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 to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child.
• 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.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
• Continuous learning benefits & related support.