Principal Product Designer, Design Systems & AI

About this role

Summary: Anaconda's Design organization now owns our design system end to end, from Figma libraries and design tokens through to the code components engineers ship. We're mid-flight on a migration of our component architecture to a modern stack, converging two product surfaces into one platform, and defining how a design practice works in an agentic AI world. As our Principal Product Designer, you'll own the design system as a product: its architecture, its governance, and its evolution across converging surfaces.

You'll partner directly with engineering to land the migration, then build the AI-forward design practice on top of it: the patterns, tooling, and workflows for designing agentic product experiences. This is a senior IC role reporting to the VP of Design, operating with wide autonomy in a deliberately flat, senior team. What You'll Do: Own the design system end to end: design tokens, component libraries, documentation, and the code components engineers consume, across two converging product surfaces.

Lead the migration of our component architecture to a modern stack (shadcn/ui, Storybook), partnering with engineering to re-baseline scope and ship a complete, production-quality tranche. Define the governance that outlives any individual: versioning, contribution model, release process, and explicit exit criteria for design handoff that both design and engineering sign. Establish Anaconda's AI-forward design practice: patterns, guidelines, and tooling for agentic product surfaces, and ship the first product experiences that use them.

Work in design and code: prototype in the production stack and review component implementations. Raise the bar across a senior design team through influence: critique, pairing, and visible craft. Use AI-assisted tools, including Claude Code, reviewing and validating AI generated output before it ships. Your Impact Will Be Measured Through: Completion and adoption of the component architecture migration across both product surfaces.

Reduction in design-to-engineering handoff time and rework, measured against explicit exit criteria. Cross-team adoption of design system governance: versioned releases, contribution model, and shared definition of done. AI-forward design patterns shipped in production surfaces and reused across the platform. What You Need: 12+ years of product design experience, including several years owning a design system at scale, tokens, component architecture, and governance, not only consumption.