Product Design Lead, Design Systems

Rippling provides a unified platform for businesses to manage HR, IT, and Finance. The Staff/Principal-level Product Design Lead will drive AI-powered design system initiatives, define AI-first user experience patterns, establish design standards, and build scalable systems that improve product quality and execution across Rippling’s products.

Responsibilities:

• Push the boundaries of what’s possible: Defining what great AI-first user experiences look like and ensure those experiences are adopted across our products
• Exercise Agency over Permission: Drive outcomes in a wildly impatient environment. Adopt a "shipping beats demos beats memos" mindset
• Set a new bar for UX quality: Lead important platform-wide efforts to build easy-to-use, highly repeatable UX patterns
• Become an authority: Drive the future Rippling’s design language, setting standards for our design system and how systems thinking is embedded within Rippling’s design practice
• Provide design feedback at scale: Build and drive systems that ensure high quality user experience across Rippling
• LLM-first: Use Agents and AI-based tools to drive alignment, velocity, and execution. Create high-fidelity prototypes; draft PRDs and data models; and deliver visuals and specifications for your final design solutions

Requirements:

• 8+ years of product design or design systems experience, heavily indexing on dense B2B platforms, horizontal architectures, or complex developer tooling
• Demonstrated AI-Native Mindset: Active use of LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT) and AI-assisted coding/prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude Code) in your daily workflow. A lack of AI prototyping capability is a non-starter
• Deep Systems Thinking: A proven ability to negotiate the horizontal complexity of a compound platform and build UI/UX frameworks that scale cleanly across dozens of product surfaces
• An outstanding portfolio showcasing a depth of knowledge in user experience, interaction, and visual/user interface design
• High-Velocity Execution: Comfort acting as an autonomous IC who drives high-quality craft without becoming a process bottleneck or committee coordinator
• Experience partnering with Product Managers, Engineers, and Product Designers to execute on component deliverables