Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

Etsy is hiring a Staff Product Designer on the Design Systems team within UX Platform to help drive growth and architecture of Collage, Etsy's design system used across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter. The role focuses on making the system opinionated rather than reactive, defining pattern libraries, closing gaps in component proposal/build/graduation/retirement, and operating the system efficiently at scale. This is a full-time position reporting to the Senior Product Design Manager for Design Systems and UX AI Enablement.

What you'll do

• Architect the system: refine component anatomy, API and composition models, variant strategies, and token structures across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter
• Make decisions that balance cross-platform coherence and platform conventions
• Anticipate system needs before consuming teams ask
• Define and refine the component lifecycle: how a component is proposed, prioritized, designed, documented, graduated, deprecated, and what \"done\" means at each stage
• Close gaps between one-off requests and durable system additions, including the path from product-team patterns into the system
• Make the system operable at scale by structuring tokens, component metadata, and documentation for programmatic operation
• Use agentic tools like Cursor or Claude to prototype architecture, validate decisions, and reduce manual work
• Document decisions, involve the team in architecture problems, and work in the open

What they're looking for

• Portfolio showing design systems work at scale: component architecture, token systems, and delivery across web, iOS, and Android; showing structure and reasoning
• Judgment about where the system should be opinionated and where it should stay flexible
• Think in composition rather than accumulation: primitives that combine, not a new component for every case; treat the system as a rising quality floor
• Comfort flexing how you work to reach quality results; agentic tools like Cursor or Claude are a lever, but understand the coded medium and infrastructure enough to know what will hold up
• Transparent way of working: write things down, share reasoning, and open problems up
• Genuine comfort working with engineers: read component implementations, discuss build constraints, and change designs based on what you learn
• Strong visual craft and a rigorous eye for typography, color, space, and density, with accessibility standards built into those decisions
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and frame poorly-defined problems