Principal Designer, Design Systems

Posted Dec 28

GitHub is looking for an experienced Principal Designer to join our Design Infrastructure team. This team is responsible for evolving our open-source design system—Primer, supporting and improving our UI design patterns, documentation, component API’s, and the cross-cutting customer experiences of GitHub products.

In this role you'll collaborate with product, design, and engineering to build, scale, and unify our visual expression through GitHub's design language. You'll partner with other systems designers and UI engineers to shape, build and maintain a system of reusable components and documentation that powers all of GitHub. Our team is composed of skilled individuals who have backgrounds in product design, design systems, design ops, and illustration; as well as CSS experts, and engineers with front-end and full-stack experience working in Rails and React.js.

If you enjoy technical problems, are a designer that also likes to dip their hands into code, value pairing with an engineer to translate implementation to great user experiences, and enjoy working on developer tools, you might find a happy home on the GitHub design team.

What we're looking for:

Principal Designers at GitHub are strong individual contributors; they're given a lot of autonomy and trust to work on high impact design projects. For this specific role, we're looking for someone who values the following:

  • Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context to the larger system of the product, as well as ensuring we support experiences for individual features.
  • Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our design system should reflect that, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Designing for inclusivity first, can lead us to solving problems for the many, and open up our product for more people.
  • Creating together: Getting to the right result is our focus, this can come from systems designers or product designers, and ideally both. Facilitating collaboration between teams and individuals is key so that we continue to evolve the design system alongside the needs of the product.
  • Progress and impact: Our team often works on the meta and so it's easy to get caught up in the design details. We have to be mindful of this and ensure we keep making decisions and move forward. This means being solutions oriented and prioritizing progress over perfection when it's the right call.
  • Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between peers and leadership. It can take time and effort to get there but it's worth it. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes, will yield better results when we can get to the “real talk”.



Responsibilities:

  • Become an authority on GitHub’s design language, setting standards for our design system and how systems thinking is embedded in GitHub’s design practice.
  • Partner with product, design, and engineering leadership to develop a strategy to move our design system efforts to the next level, based on your understanding of the unique requirements, opportunities, and constraints here at GitHub.
  • Work in close collaboration with the Design leadership team to evolve design processes and foster a culture of inclusion, collaboration, and innovation.
  • Drive alignment across high impact patterns, component redesigns, and cross-cutting features of our design system and help define strategy for when and how we should diverge from established patterns.
  • Lead efforts to validate product, design, or architectural innovations and are often focused on future-forward solutions and scale.
  • Provide regular design feedback to other designers and engineers on implementing and contributing to our design system.
  • Work closely with engineers to ensure the designs are implemented effectively and iterate to refine the design and respond to customer feedback.
  • Partner with select teams developing new features to share expertise as projects move from conception to launch, with a view to growing the project teams systems thinking practices.
  • Own complex component design from inception to delivery, including engineering collaboration, roll out plans and usability testing, usage guidelines, and representation in design tools such as Figma.
  • Contribute to design systems documentation, training materials, and onboarding.

Required Qualifications:

  • 9+ years minimum design experience as an individual contributor.
  • 3+ years experience working with design systems at scale.
  • Lead highly technical, high complex projects with cross-functional teams of designers and engineers.
  • Confident in writing HTML & CSS and are comfortable using github.com and Git version control.
  • Portfolio or Website that demonstrates design systems skills and experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Deep experience in platform / device design patterns and templates, design thinking, product design, technology enterprise project or program management, service design or design strategy.
  • Experience providing feedback, coaching, and mentoring to other designers in systems thinking.
  • Technical understanding of capabilities and limitations for web platforms.
  • Comfortable with Figma, JavaScript, React.js, or working in Rails applications.

Bonus Points If You Have:

  • Experience building a design system from scratch.
  • Experience designing cross-platform experiences including native mobile (iOS and Android).
  • Seamlessly integrated brand expression into a design system.
  • Led the development of internal or open-source design systems and/or created or contributed to open-source projects.
  • Expertly unblocked and helped teammates identify possible solutions while driving toward a decision.


Minimum salary of $134,800 to maximum $357,500.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

Location: In this role, you can work remotely from anywhere in the United States or onsite in one of GitHub’s U.S. offices (San Francisco, Bellevue, Raleigh).

#LI-Remote


Who We Are:

GitHub is the developer company. We make it easier for developers to be developers: to work together, to solve challenging problems, and to create the world’s most important technologies. We foster a collaborative community that can come together—as individuals and in teams—to create the future of software and make a difference in the world.

Leadership Principles:

Customer Obsessed - Trust by Default - Ship to Learn - Own the Outcome - Growth Mindset - Global Product, Global Team - Anything is Possible - Practice Kindness

Why You Should Join:

At GitHub, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hubbers) to do the best work of their lives. We've designed one of the coolest workspaces in San Francisco (HQ), where many Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The rest of our Hubbers work remotely around the globe. Check out an updated list of where we can hire here: https://github.com/about/careers/remote

We are also committed to keeping Hubbers healthy, motivated, focused and creative. We've designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we've built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

Please note that benefits vary by country. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask your Talent Partner.