Product Design Lead, Design Systems

About the role

This Staff/Principal-level Designer will drive AI-powered design system work at Rippling - from AI user experience patterns to internal systems that drive quality and speed.

The Rippling Design System team is responsible for driving the core UX across over 40 products and raising the bar for quality across the company. This group is at the forefront of creating cutting edge AI tooling to ensure designers and product teams can build advanced prototypes and production-ready code that leverage our design system code and best practices. Because Design Systems is at the heart of the Rippling Platform, this is one of the highest-impact positions at Rippling.

As a Lead Designer, you'll work with many teams across Rippling to drive key, platform-wide projects. Your work will enable all teams to move quickly and deliver exceptional product experiences.

What you will do

• 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.

What you will need

• 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.

Even if you don’t meet all of the requirements listed here, we still encourage you to apply. Skills can be used in lots of different ways and your life and professional experience may be relevant beyond what a list of requirements will capture.

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email [email protected].

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.