Design Systems Lead AI skills New York City , USA Imprint AI tooling Design tokens Governance

Imprint builds co-branded credit programs and payment experiences for brand partners such as Crate & Barrel, Rakuten, Booking.com, H-E-B, Fetch, and Shell, combining payments infrastructure, underwriting, and customer data. The role will define and drive the long-term vision and roadmap for Imprint's design system, partner with Product Design, Engineering, Product Management, and AI teams, establish governance and contribution models, evolve the system toward machine-readable and AI-consumable foundations, mentor a small team of design systems designers, and remain hands-on contributing to component architecture, documentation, patterns, and guidelines. What you'll do Define and drive the long-term vision and roadmap for Imprint's design system, balancing immediate product needs with long-term platform investments Partner with Product Design, Engineering, Product Management, and AI teams to ensure system components are scalable, maintainable, production-ready, and aligned to shared priorities Establish governance, contribution models, and decision-making frameworks that give product teams a shared source of truth and enable faster work without sacrificing quality or consistency Evolve the design system beyond traditional Figma libraries and Storybook documentation toward machine-readable, AI-consumable foundations that connect design tooling, code generation, and AI-assisted development Mentor a small team of design systems designers and partner with developers to raise the bar on systems thinking, prioritization, and ownership Contribute directly to component architecture, documentation, patterns, and guidelines, and lead complex initiatives from strategy through execution What they're looking for 8+ years of product design experience, including significant design systems ownership and experience leading or managing design systems teams Demonstrated success building and scaling design systems used across multiple product teams in a production environmentDeep understanding of component architecture, design tokens, accessibility standards, and design-to-development workflows Strong product judgment with the ability to prioritize high-impact work and make tradeoffs between near-term product needs and long-term system investments Experience partnering closely with frontend engineers and engineering leadership to ship system components that are adopted and trusted Comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment where you own both strategy and execution and where the system needs to evolve continuously Excellent ability to communicate and influence across functions, including educating and advocating for design systems with teams that haven't worked with one before Nice to have: Experience with modern frontend technologies, component-based development, Storybook, and design token infrastructure #J-18808-Ljbffr Into Design Systems