Lead Product Designer - Design Foundations, Interstate

Company Cox Automotive - USA Job Family Group Engineering / Product Development Job Profile Lead UX Architect Management Level Manager
- Non People Leader Flexible Work Option Hybrid
- Ability to work remotely part of the week Travel % No Work Shift Day Compensation Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $ - $. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

The Design Foundations team is a small group of designers and engineers focused on improving the quality and efficiency of product design at Cox Automotive. We build the tools, practices, and processes used by all designers and front‑end engineers across the organization. Our most established work includes two design systems:
Interstate (for B2B products) and Iris (for consumer‑facing products). More recently, we've been building AI tools like MCP connectors, context, and skills that deliver on our mission of quality and efficiency.

We are looking for a Lead Product Designer to own the design of Interstate, our B2B design system and the shared foundation beneath every Cox Automotive B2B product. You will be the senior‑most individual contributor and design voice for Interstate, reporting to the Design Director, and the person other designers look to for where the system should go next. This isn't a role where you maintain a component library in isolation.

You'll work closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and the broader organization to create tools, components, and infrastructure that make everyone around you faster and better. As AI‑assisted design and development accelerates, the design system becomes the source of truth that ensures quality and consistency at scale, whether a component was composed by a person or an agent. The playbook for "design systems + AI" is being written right now, and you want to help write it.

Own and evolve Interstate: guidelines, tokens, components, reusable patterns, and the structural decisions that keep the system coherent as it grows across teams and products. Set design direction for new, ambiguous features where none exists yet, and tie that direction to product and customer value. Set the quality bar for design execution, accessibility, and usability that every other team inherits. Create interaction and visual patterns that work across product areas and user types, and know when to push beyond the system to solve a novel problem while maintaining consistency.

Define the rules of the road for Interstate: contribution, versioning, and deprecation models that let the system evolve quickly without fragmenting, so teams know how to propose, adopt, and retire patterns. Shape the design side of Interstate's AI tooling: make the system machine‑readable, define how agents compose UIs from its components correctly, and direct the output of design and prototyping tools.

Spot the opportunity no one assigned you. Talk to product managers, designers, and engineers, find where the system falls short, take the initiative to fix it, communicate the change across the org, and measure whether it landed. Grow the design judgment of other designers through critique, pairing, and clear standards, so good decisions hold up when you are not in the room.

Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and 6 years’ experience in a related field; or a different combination, such as a master’s degree and 4 years’ experience; a Ph.D. and 1 years’ experience in a related field; or 10 years’ experience in a related field.…