Staff Product Designer, Design System

Replit is the agentic software creation platform that enables anyone to build applications using natural language. With millions of users worldwide, Replit is democratizing software development by removing traditional barriers to application creation.

We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer, Design System to own and evolve Replit’s design system end-to-end. This role sits at the intersection of product design, design engineering, and platform thinking, with direct impact on both internal velocity and external enterprise adoption.

THE ROLE

As Staff Product Designer for the Design System, you will be the primary owner and steward of Replit’s design system—its components, patterns, principles, and governance. You’ll work closely with product designers, engineers, and design engineers to ensure the system scales across the product, supports enterprise use cases (including customer-integrated design systems), and enables fast, high-quality product development.

This is a senior, high-leverage role. You’ll define not just what the system is, but how it evolves, how decisions get made, and how consistency and flexibility are balanced as Replit ships rapidly.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Own the Design System

• Lead the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Replit’s design system.

• Define and evolve core components, patterns, tokens, and interaction standards used across the product.

• Ensure the system supports a wide range of surfaces, from core product UI to Agent flows, enterprise templates, and customer-integrated design systems.

Enable Product & Enterprise Scale

• Partner with product designers and engineers to ensure new features are built on system primitives.

• Design for extensibility: support custom stacks, enterprise design systems, and customer-specific theming without fragmentation.

• Improve discoverability, clarity, and usability of system-driven UI across key entry points.

Partner Deeply with Engineering

• Collaborate closely with design engineers on implementation details, tradeoffs, and system architecture.

• Influence code-level decisions that affect system consistency and adoption.

• Help shape tooling, Storybook usage, and contribution workflows so the system is easy to use and maintain.

Set Standards & Governance

• Establish clear contribution models, review processes, and decision-making frameworks for system changes.

• Act as a design system “domain owner,” providing guidance and sign-off on system-level decisions.

• Document principles, patterns, and rationale so decisions scale beyond individuals.

Raise the Bar for Design Quality

• Identify inconsistencies, duplication, and fragmentation across the product and drive systematic improvements.

• Balance speed with craft—knowing when to be opinionated and when to enable flexibility.

• Advocate for system-level thinking across product, design, and engineering.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Experience & Skills

• 10+ years of product design experience, with deep ownership of a design system at scale.

• Strong systems thinker: you see patterns, abstractions, and long-term implications.

• Experience collaborating closely with engineers on component APIs, implementation details, and constraints.

• Comfort operating at multiple levels—from high-level principles to pixel- and interaction-level decisions.

Design System Expertise

• Proven track record of designing and evolving complex component libraries.

• Experience supporting multiple products, teams, or customer-specific variations from a shared system.

• Strong opinions on system governance, contribution models, and adoption strategies.

Ways of Working

• Highly collaborative, with the ability to influence without relying on hierarchy.

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and incomplete information.

• Pragmatic: you know when to ship, when to refactor, and when to say no.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience working with developer-focused products or tools.

• Familiarity with design tokens, theming, and cross-platform systems.

• Background in or strong partnership with design engineering.

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

Replit’s design system is no longer just an internal efficiency tool—it’s a core part of our enterprise value proposition and a foundation for how customers build with us. This role has outsized impact on product quality, team velocity, and how Replit scales to serve thousands of designers and developers using their own design systems inside our platform.

If you’re excited about owning a living system, shaping how design and engineering collaborate, and building infrastructure that unlocks creativity at scale, we’d love to talk.

This is a full-time role that can be held from our Foster City, CA office. The role has an in-office requirement of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Full-Time Employee Benefits Include:

💰 Competitive Salary & Equity

💹 401(k) Program with a 4% match

⚕️ Health, Dental, Vision and Life Insurance

🩼 Short Term and Long Term Disability

🚼 Paid Parental, Medical, Caregiver Leave

🚗 Commuter Benefits

📱 Monthly Wellness Stipend

🧑‍💻 Autonomous Work Environment

🖥 In Office Set-Up Reimbursement

🏝 Flexible Time Off (FTO) + Holidays

🚀 Quarterly Team Gatherings

☕ In Office Amenities

Want to learn more about what we are up to?

• Meet the Replit Agent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYiVPrxY8-Y

• Replit: Make an app for that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zd9hzngFwY

• Replit Blog https://blog.replit.com/

• Amjad TED Talk https://youtu.be/kCudFI4tcpg?si=l4ViCejV_f2RZkDi

Interviewing + Culture at Replit

• Operating Principles https://blog.replit.com/operating-principles

• Reasons not to work at Replit https://blog.replit.com/reasons-not-to-join-replit

To achieve our mission of making programming more accessible around the world, we need our team to be representative of the world. We welcome your unique perspective and experiences in shaping this product. We encourage people from all kinds of backgrounds to apply, including and especially candidates from underrepresented and non-traditional backgrounds.