Design Systems Product Designer

Skip to main content

Jobs

Teams

Career Programs

Working at Meta

[[JD_HEADING:Blog

Podcasts

Jobs

Design Systems Product Designer]]

Design Systems Product Designer

Design

+ 1 more

Apply now

We're looking for a senior Product Designer to set the vision and strategic direction for Instagram Design Systems (IGDS) — the system that ensures craft scales with Instagram.

Instagram is entering a new era of building. AI agents are shipping UI, product teams are moving faster than ever, and our system is the connective tissue that ensures quality doesn't get lost in the pace. IGDS exists to make craft and consistency the default — not the exception — across every surface, for every builder (human and AI alike).

Our north star: design and code stay in lockstep, making on-system quality the path of least resistance for product teams and AI agents alike.

This role sits at the intersection of design craft, systems architecture, platform engineering, and AI-native tooling. You'll own the strategic direction of how Instagram's design system evolves — identifying new opportunities, shaping the roadmap, and driving initiatives from vision through execution across component design, documentation, and AI knowledge layers that power our Design Brain agents.

The work spans component libraries, spec-to-code alignment, design tooling, and cross-platform standards (iOS, Android, iPad, foldables) — requiring someone who can set direction for systematic quality end-to-end while navigating the organizational and technical complexity of shipping at Instagram's scale.

You'll be a recognized leader not just within design, but across the product group — driving execution, culture, and process on a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, and product managers. You'll influence product design teams across Instagram to drive adoption, shape what's on-system vs. bespoke, and ensure the system flexes to serve both today's UI patterns and tomorrow's AI-generated experiences.

The ideal candidate has deep systems thinking, exceptional craft sensibilities, a strong point of view on scalable design architecture, and the ability to identify new opportunities, influence senior stakeholders, and drive initiatives that wouldn't happen without them.

Design Systems Product Designer Responsibilities

• Identify, shape, and drive the most critical initiatives for Instagram's Design System. You'll spot gaps and opportunities that others miss — defining new strategic bets like component expansion, spec-to-code alignment, or AI-native tooling — and drive them from vision through execution with quality and coherence. People should be able to say: "this wouldn't have happened without you.".
• Design scalable, composable component systems. You'll lead the design of components that flex across surfaces, platforms, and contexts — including AI-assembled UI. This includes defining motion language, interaction behaviors, and componentry that feel cohesive end-to-end. You'll define slot-based APIs, composability patterns, and quality standards that work for both human designers and agents.
• Close and maintain the gap between design spec and shipped code. You'll create the frameworks and processes that keep design and engineering in sync by default — so drift doesn't recur, and what designers spec is what engineers build.
• Evolve the AI knowledge layer (Design Brain). You'll help keep IGDS's AI-powered designer, reviewer, and prototyper agents current and accurate — expanding coverage across surface areas so every agent interaction produces on-system, high-quality output.
• Hold the craft bar for systematic design across your workstreams. You'll ensure every component, pattern, and guideline reflects Instagram's premium quality standard — across iOS, Android, iPad, and foldables. You'll make "on-system" feel better than bespoke, not like a compromise.
• Drive adoption through influence and organizational leadership. You'll work directly with designers and leadership across Instagram to expand coverage, convert deprecated patterns, and build genuine organizational pull toward on-system building — shaping how teams think about quality and consistency, not just what they build.
• Build out new patterns in partnership with product teams. You'll work with teams like Growth to co-create patterns that serve real product needs — turning recurring design problems into reusable, on-system solutions that raise quality across surfaces.
• Contribute to design tooling and workflow improvements that accelerate on-system work. You'll help shape tools like Paperplane (our on-device prototyping tool) and generative Figma plugins — and invest in improving design workflows end-to-end (Figma library management, deck development, documentation templates). You'll ensure tooling connects to the system and makes on-system design the fastest path, not a constraint.
• Build measurement approaches that demonstrate system value. You'll partner with data and engineering to understand system coverage, adoption, and quality — building the evidence base that justifies continued investment and prioritization.
• Shape product group direction beyond design. You'll operate as a leader across the broader product group — influencing engineering architecture decisions, product priorities, and resource allocation.
• You'll operate as a leader across the broader product group — influencing engineering architecture decisions, product priorities, and resource allocation. You'll lobby for new ideas, navigate organizational complexity, and use your deep institutional knowledge of how Meta builds products to get things done that few others can.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of product design experience, with a proven track record of identifying and driving design system initiatives at consumer scale — including component libraries, design tokens, documentation, or governance. You should have led (not just contributed to) systematic work that had broad organizational impact
• A portfolio that demonstrates exceptional systems thinking and craft — showing work that spans component design, pattern libraries, cross-platform adaptation, or design tooling. We want to see rigor and beauty
• Deep experience designing for large-scale consumer products — ideally platforms where consistency across dozens of surfaces and hundreds of engineers is a real challenge. You've been a recognized leader not just within design, but across a broader product group
• Demonstrated ability to identify opportunities and design systems that scale — you've made decisions about abstraction, composability, and quality that held up to the complexity of real product development, and you drove those initiatives proactively rather than being handed them
• Experience partnering closely with engineering on component APIs, code architecture, and spec-to-code alignment — you understand the translation layer between design intent and implementation
• Comfort with AI-native workflows and tooling — either direct experience building systems for AI agents to consume, or strong intuition for how design knowledge needs to be structured for machine readability
• Experience measuring design system adoption and quality — you've helped build the case for system investment through evidence, not just conviction
• Cross-platform experience (iOS, Android, responsive) with an understanding of how platform design languages evolve and how systems accommodate that evolution — with particular familiarity with Android design patterns and development workflows

Preferred Qualifications

• Systems architecture — structures a design system for scale, has a POV on the flexibility vs. consistency trade-off
• Exceptional craft in systematic design — fluent in both individual component craft (typography, spacing, motion, interaction) and the architecture of how components compose - creates systems that are beautiful at every level of zoom
• Cross-platform fluency, with Android depth — system-level abstraction