Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead

Job description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure. Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users. Our platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $260M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development. We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you. ## **Applying to Render** We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team. We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed. Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time. ## About the Role How we build software is changing. Designers are prototyping in code, engineers are shipping polished interfaces, and agents are starting to build directly into the product. More people and more *things* can create software than ever before. That makes design judgment more important, not less. We're looking for a Staff/Principal **Founding Design Systems Lead** to build that judgment into Render's foundations. This isn't about maintaining a component library. It's about enabling designers, engineers, and agents to build experiences that look, feel, and work like Render, without a designer making every decision or the design systems team reviewing every change. At a company whose whole promise is a platform that *just works*, the design system is how we keep craft scaling as the product and the team grows. **This role starts hands-on.** You're a designer first, with the technical depth to get into the code. You'll partner with the Head of Design to set the vision, then do the foundational work yourself: decide where or whether our Figma library lives and how it operates, get deep into what an AI-ready design system really means, and prototype, test, and ship the system in code. As the function grows, you'll build and lead the team around it. You're energized by building from the ground up, not inheriting something finished. Here's what makes this role urgent and specific to us: our users are developers, and they're increasingly building *with AI agents*. That cuts both ways. Inside Render, teams reach for an agent before they check the docs — so a system that isn't legible to AI quietly gets bypassed, and quality drifts toward generic output. And externally, we're building the platform where developers deploy AI-native apps and agents. The person in this role treats the design system as **infrastructure for humans, machines, and velocity** and has a point of view on what that takes: machine-readable documentation, system rules exposed where agents can read them, an architecture that keeps the brand and accessibility layers ours, and evaluations that catch drift before it ships. This role reports to the Head of Design. ## **This role is for you if you're excited by:** **Making great design reproducible, by people and agents.** Raise the quality of Render's product and encode what makes it good, so a designer, an engineer, or an agent can produce coherent, usable experiences by default. The system should make excellent work easier, not make every experience look the same. **Reimagining what a design system can be.** Build beyond components and tokens into composition rules, interaction patterns, agent-readable guidance, and evaluations, so the fastest way to build is also a path to great quality. **Building and leading a team that multiplies everyone else's impact.** Start hands-on, then create the direction, ambitious goals, and caring-but-demanding environment that let a team do the best work of their careers. The opportunity is to raise the floor for everyone building at Render, human or agent, while giving designers more room to make the most important experiences extraordinary. ## **What You'll Do** - **Set the system's vision and direction.** Decide what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on what builders and customers need — and turn that into focused work, much of which you'll do yourself at first. - **Build the foundations hands-on.** Early on, you *are* the team: setting the architecture, shipping the components, writing the guidance, and establishing the quality bar through your own work before there's anyone to delegate to. - **Build and lead the team that owns the system.** As the function grows, hire and develop it — set priorities and ownership, give direct feedback, hold a high bar, and help people do the best work of their careers. - **Elevate Render's visual and interaction design.** Raise the bar for typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility — and the states beyond the happy path, which is where developer tools earn their reputation. - **Make the system legible to AI, not just humans.** Lead the work to make Render's design system AI-ready: machine-readable documentation, system rules and tokens exposed where agents can reach them (e.g. via MCP), and an architecture that shrinks the context an agent needs while keeping the brand and accessibility layers ours. The goal: agents building on Render produce on-brand, compliant work by default. - **Guide technical architecture with engineering.** Shape everything from components and tokens to how agents discover guidance and check their work. Make sound tradeoffs between flexibility, coherence, performance, and ease of use — layered and headless where that scales better than rigid bundles. - **Define and measure quality, including AI output.** Build repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks — testing generated output against the system's standard, not just whether people use the tools. - **Earn adoption.** Work alongside product teams, teach through examples, and turn recurring questions and exceptions into improvements. A system lives or dies on whether people, and their agents, reach for it. - **Keep moving as the ground shifts.** Experiment as models and tools evolve, share what you learn, and change direction when the evidence calls for it. ## What We're Looking For - **A track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering** — and the appetite to build a function from the ground up before leading a team. You create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and keep momentum without dropping the quality bar. Experience leading or developing designers/design engineers is a strong plus, as this role grows in that area. - **Exceptional visual and interaction design skills.** Your work shows a clear point of view, detail that borders on obsessive, and an ability to make complex experiences feel simple — the kind of craft other practitioners admire. - **Deep systems thinking, and experience building systems other teams actually adopt.** You can show how your work improved both their speed *and* the quality of what shipped — not just that it existed. - **Strong technical fluency.** You can prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture (component API design, tokens, theming, layered/headless patterns), and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers — not just hand off specs. - **Hands-on use of AI in your work, and a real point of view on AI-ready design systems.** You understand where AI helps and where it fails, how to improve its output rather than accept it, and what it takes for a system to serve machines as well as humans. You don't need to have shipped all of it, but you should be able to say where you'd start and why. - **Strong product judgment and developer empathy.** You stay close to the people who use what you build and connect system decisions to real workflows and outcomes. Fluency with developers and technical products is a strong plus — our users are engineers, and the system has to serve them and the agents they build with. ## Nice-to-Haves - Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage. - Hands-on experience making a design system AI-ready: machine-readable documentation, MCP or similar agent access, layered/headless architecture, or evaluation frameworks for AI-generated output. - Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams' daily workflow. - Experience leading a major design-system migration or a company-wide change in how teams build. - Experience evolving a system across platforms, or connecting product and brand experiences. - Founder or early-stage startup experience. If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need. ## Benefits - 4 weeks of paid vacation. - 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return. - Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans. - 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well. - Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc. - Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy. - Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders. - Continuous learning benefits & related support. *This position is generally not eligible for new visasponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.* *Render is an equal-opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.* *We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.* *We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you!* [Render — CCPA Applicant Privacy Notice](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wKr9IejoT5McFrs9I2mahQnf6AFwb3z2/view) [Render — GDPR Applicant Privacy Notice](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_8jtyXQ1HdRdTdQn9sZ7n-R-zAGBmsFa/view)