Product Design Lead, Design Systems

About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third‑party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America’s best startup employers by Forbes. We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from  addresses.

The Rippling Design System team is responsible for ensuring every product at Rippling has a high-quality and cohesive user experience. Design Systems does this by developing the high-quality building blocks and UX patterns used by over 40 product teams. The Design Systems team also builds advanced AI tooling to ensure designers and product teams can build advanced prototypes and production-ready code based on our design system.

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 on the Design Systems team, you’ll execute on high-impact projects like advanced patterns and new, AI‑first user experiences. You’ll work with many teams across Rippling to drive key, platform-wide projects and design components that will be adopted into the Rippling platform, becoming exceptional experiences for Rippling’s end users. You will be working closely with the Frontend Platform team to help build and manage our global design language and library of components.

Your work will enable all the teams at Rippling to move quickly and at scale, while maintaining our exceptionally high quality bar.

• Lead efforts to simplify a wide range of complex workflows by developing easy‑to‑use, highly repeatable UX patterns and components.
• Help define AI‑based design systems to accelerate the work of our design team.
• Become an authority on Rippling’s design language, setting standards for our design system and how systems thinking is embedded within Rippling’s design practice.
• Provide regular design feedback to other designers and engineers on implementing and contributing to our design system, and solicit feedback from them to ensure we’re addressing product needs.
• Effectively manage your time and process to meet team deadlines.
• Create and validate designs through sketches, prototypes, and testing.
• Work with Engineering to ensure high-quality implementation and user experience.
• Create high‑fidelity visuals and specifications for your final design solutions.

• 6+ years of experience as a design systems or product designer
• Experience defining and expanding design systems, components and patterns
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
• An outstanding portfolio showcasing a depth of knowledge in user experience, interaction, and visual/user interface design.
• Experience partnering with Product Managers, Engineers, and Product Designers to execute on component deliverables.
• Experience with prototyping as a means to explore and convey design solutions.
• Experience using or building AI tools is a plus

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.

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,…