Design Systems Lead

Job description

WHO WE ARE Imprint helps the world's best brands grow the lifetime value of their customers. We started with co-branded credit cards and rebuilt them to be smarter, more rewarding, and brand-first. We partner with companies like Crate & Barrel, Rakuten, Booking.com http://Booking.com, H-E-B, Fetch, and Shell to launch modern credit programs that deepen loyalty, unlock savings, and drive growth. But the card is just the beginning. We combine advanced payments infrastructure, intelligent underwriting, and deep customer data to create delightful and personalized experiences for members as well as efficient and profitable relationships for our brand partners. Our robust technology and world-class operations allow us and our brand partners to offer powerful financial products without becoming a bank. In the U.S., co-branded cards alone account for over $300 billion in annual spend, and most still run on decades-old legacy bank systems. Imprint is the modern alternative: flexible, embeddable, and built for how people actually pay today. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, Ribbit, and Khosla Ventures, we're building a world-class team to redefine how people pay and how brands grow. If you want to move fast, solve hard problems, and own real outcomes, we want to meet you. THE OPPORTUNITY - Define and drive the long-term vision and roadmap for Imprint's design system, balancing immediate product needs with long-term platform investments - Partner deeply 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 let them move faster 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, raising the bar on systems thinking, prioritization, and ownership across the group - Stay hands-on by contributing directly to component architecture, documentation, patterns, and guidelines, and by leading complex initiatives from strategy through execution YOUR PROFILE Required - 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 environment - Deep 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 actually adopted and trusted - Comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment where you own both the strategy and the 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 - Experience with AI-assisted design, code generation, or agent-driven workflows, particularly in exploring how AI transforms the way products are designed and built - Background in design engineering or highly technical product environments where the line between design and development is intentionally blurred - Experience building design systems in high-growth startup environments where the system had to scale alongside rapid product expansion We don't expect every candidate to check every box. If this role excites you and you bring strong fundamentals, we encourage you to apply. STACK Figma, Storybook, design tokens. Frontend component libraries (React/TypeScript). AI-assisted design and development tooling. LEARN MORE Learn more about how we build at Imprint on our engineering blog: https://tech.imprint.co/ PERKS & BENEFITS - Competitive compensation and equity packages - Leading configured work computers of your choice - Flexible paid time off - Fully covered, high-quality healthcare, including fully covered dependent coverage - Additional health coverage includes access to One Medical and the option to enroll in an FSA - 20 weeks of paid parental leave for the primary caregiver and 8 weeks for all new parents - Access to industry-leading technology across all of our business units, stemming from our philosophy that we should invest in resources for our team that foster innovation, optimization, and productivity Imprint is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Imprint is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. Imprint welcomes talented individuals from all backgrounds who want to build the future of payments and rewards. If you are passionate about FinTech and eager to grow, let’s move the world forward, together.