Principal Product Designer, Design Systems

Kin Insurance is a remote-first company focused on simplifying and improving homeowners' experiences. They are seeking a Principal Product Designer to lead the development of a cohesive design system that enhances product consistency and user experience across various offerings.

Responsibilities:

• Using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor), audit existing component libraries and live product experiences — mapping gaps, drift, and inconsistencies — to generate a data-backed plan to unify and streamline the system
• Own and drive Kin's token architecture across color, typography, spacing, and motion, structured as primitive, semantic, and component tokens, as the single source of truth for design and code
• Experience designing token systems that scale across different contexts -- internal tools, customer-facing apps, or multi-brand surfaces -- with an architecture that can flex without fragmenting
• Establish and maintain Figma-to-code parity, partnering with engineering on the pipeline from design tokens to implemented, documented components
• Introduce new components and patterns thoughtfully as Kin moves into new product domains, ensuring the system grows with intention rather than sprawl
• Define the contribution model and governance — versioning, changelogs, intake, and quality bars — and implement automated guardrails that let teams extend the system without fragmentation
• Build the single source of truth that replaces disparate tools as the canonical reference for Kin's design patterns
• Advocate for accessibility in components so teams inherit it by default, using automated testing and AI-assisted audits to proactively identify compliance gaps
• Partner across Product, Engineering, and embedded domain designers to make the system the easiest path to a cohesive, on-brand experience across every surface

Requirements:

• A track record of taking a design system from audit through architecture to adoption — you treat the system as a product, not a deliverable
• Significant visual and product design experience, commonly 7+ years, with a meaningful stretch focused specifically on design systems work
• Deep fluency in token architecture (primitive / semantic / component) and mastery of Figma as a systems tool — variables, libraries, and modes
• Proven ability to leverage AI tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate manual tasks, automate documentation, and speed up the design-to-code feedback loop
• The ability to influence without authority — you set direction and bring partners along across a federated org without relying on positional power
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and 0-to-1 spaces, where the structure doesn't exist yet and you're the one building it
• Experience in insurance, fintech, or other complex, regulated, high-consideration product domains
• Familiarity with the design-to-code toolchain — Storybook/Chromatic, a token transformer like Style Dictionary, and how tokens land in a real front-end stack (Angular, Rails, etc.)
• Comfort reading or contributing to component code