Principal Designer - Design Systems AI skills San Jose , eBay - Governance Accessibility

eBay is hiring a Principal Designer for Design Systems in San Jose. The role is director-level and owns the long-term vision, principles, strategy and roadmap of eBay's design system across products and platforms. It brings Design, Product and Engineering together, stays hands-on in foundational patterns and components, and ties system decisions to measurable business and customer outcomes. Part of the role is shaping how AI changes design systems and design practice.

• Define and lead the vision for eBay's design system, establishing the principles, strategy, and roadmap that shape how experiences are designed and built across eBay, and ensuring system decisions are grounded in measurable business and customer outcomes
• Lead the Design Systems practice, bringing together Design, Product, and Engineering to evolve a shared system that enables teams to build high-quality experiences faster and more consistently, while tracking impact through adoption, efficiency, and product quality metrics
• Set the bar for craft and quality, remaining hands‑on in the design of foundational patterns, components, interaction models, and frameworks that solve complex needs across eBay
• Evolve the system for the future, finding opportunities to make it more flexible, scalable, accessible, and expressive across products, platforms, and emerging experiences
• Define and drive the go‑to‑market and adoption strategy for the design system, ensuring clear positioning, enablement, and rollout plans for designers and cross‑functional partners
• Drive adoption and impact at scale, partnering with teams to understand their needs, remove friction, and ensure the system delivers measurable improvements in quality, consistency, velocity, and key product and business metrics
• Shape how AI changes design systems and design practice, experimenting with new tools and approaches that improve how the system is created, maintained, and used by designers and engineers, with a focus on measurable gains in speed, quality and scalability
• Influence senior leaders and cross‑functional partners, building alignment around system‑level investments, standards, and decisions that require coordination across organizational boundaries

• 12+ years experience leading design systems or platform design at scale, with a track record of shaping systems used across multiple products, teams, and platforms
• Exceptional product design craft, with deep expertise in interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, and the details required to create coherent, high‑quality experiences
• The ability to think in systems while designing in the details, connecting individual components and patterns to broader product experiences and organizational needs
• Deep understanding of design system architecture and practice, including components, patterns, tokens, accessibility, governance, contribution models, documentation and adoption
• Strong understanding of the relationship between design and front‑end technology, with the ability to partner deeply with Engineering on scalable implementation
• Proven track record to lead, building alignment and raising the quality of work across a large, matrixed organization
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to make complex system decisions clear and build conviction with designers, engineers, product leaders, and executives
• A forward‑looking perspective on AI , emerging technology, and the future of design systems, paired with a willingness to experiment and turn new ideas into practical solutions