UX: Staff Product Designer, Design Systems - Visual

HubSpot is an AI-powered customer platform providing software, integrations, and resources for marketing, sales, and service. The Staff Product Designer will own and evolve the Trellis enterprise design system’s token architecture and visual language across HubSpot’s product portfolio, while guiding visual quality, governance, AI-readability, and implementation fidelity.

Responsibilities:

• Design and steward the three-tier token graph — global, semantic, and component-specific — ensuring it scales to meet multi-theme, multi-platform, and multi-density requirements across the full HubSpot product surface
• Make and defend architectural token decisions: naming conventions, tier boundaries, semantic abstraction levels, and the tradeoffs between flexibility and constraint that determine how well the system scales
• Manage token migrations without breaking downstream consumers — designing safe, phased rollout processes and the governance model that keeps consuming teams aligned
• Own the visual language of Trellis: the system-level decisions in color, typography, spacing, iconography, and motion that make HubSpot's product experiences feel intentional, cohesive, and distinctly HubSpot
• Serve as the "final eye" on visual quality: hold the aesthetic quality bar for a system consumed by hundreds of designers, and navigate disagreements about visual direction with clarity, craft evidence, and authority
• Develop and communicate design principles and tenets that give your team and consuming designers a framework for navigating visual decisions without requiring alignment overhead on every choice
• Lead the effort to make the Trellis token layer machine-readable: structuring token names and documentation in formats that AI coding tools, MCP integrations, and generative UI systems can consume and apply correctly
• Partner with product teams across Hubspot as the token and visual language authority — helping them build on the system correctly and surfacing friction points that indicate the system needs to evolve
• Collaborate with engineers on implementation fidelity: understand the technical constraints that shape token decisions, and advocate for design intent within those constraints credibly and practically
• Contribute to Trellis governance: participate in the contribution review process, hold the quality standard for design language decisions that originate in product teams, and help shape the policies that prevent token drift across the platform

Requirements:

• You're known for your expert-level design craft and ability to lead multiple projects at a time
• You've worked hands-on leading teams to evolve the content, visual, interaction, motion and illustration assets and patterns that bring a brand ethos to life in our digital product ecosystem
• You're a compelling presenter with a clear and informed POV
• You've built solid relationships with your cross-functional partners, demonstrating a deep understanding of strategy and business goals
• You're well-known for your vision and thought leadership and everyone on the team looks to you for long-term thinking
• Prior hands-on ownership of a multi-tier token architecture at enterprise scale — has designed and shipped a token system for a multi-product or multi-platform environment, not just implemented tokens within one
• Demonstrated track record of making consequential token architecture decisions and owning their downstream effects: naming, tier structure, semantic abstraction, and breaking change management
• Full command of visual design as a systems discipline — understands how color, typography, spacing, iconography, and motion function as a unified language rather than independent decisions, and can articulate the principles behind each
• Experience evolving a mature design language: knows how to push it forward without breaking it, has navigated the tension between brand evolution and system consistency, and can make those tradeoffs visible to stakeholders
• Portfolio that demonstrates the aesthetic output of their token and systems work — not just technically correct token architecture, but a coherent, high-quality visual product
• Has formed their own design tenets and can deploy them to navigate ambiguous visual decisions without extensive alignment overhead
• Working knowledge of or demonstrated interest in machine-readable design systems — understands W3C DTCG token format, the role of semantic naming as machine-readable intent, and how token documentation can be structured for AI tool ingestion
• Stays engaged with the evolution of design token standards and tooling: Tokens Studio, Style Dictionary, Figma Variables API, and emerging MCP/AI integrations — and can make informed Trellis pipeline decisions as the ecosystem evolves
• Approaches the AI tooling layer with both curiosity and rigor: excited about what becomes possible, clear-eyed about what needs to be designed deliberately
• Operates with Staff-level autonomy: capable of identifying the right problem, proposing the right solution, and driving it to resolution without requiring close direction
• Comfortable partnering with engineering on implementation fidelity — understands technical constraints well enough to advocate for design intent credibly, and to recognize when design decisions need to adapt to engineering reality
• Can communicate token architecture decisions to non-specialist stakeholders — makes the invisible infrastructure of a design system legible to product leadership without oversimplifying it
• Has experience as a quality bar holder: has held the visual standard for a system used by many designers, navigated disagreement with clarity, and done so in a way that builds trust rather than creating friction