Staff Designer - Design Systems

PhonePe; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 400,000 - 700,000; Full time

Job summary

PhonePe is seeking a Design Systems leader to shape the foundations, tokens and patterns used across our consumer and fintech products. You’ll own the system's direction, quality and governance, working closely with designers and engineers to improve consistency and velocity.

You will lead the Design Systems team, partner with Design Systems Engineering, and drive adoption across Android, iOS and web, while ensuring accessibility and localization for India at scale.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in product design, with experience building or leading a mature design system.
• Deep understanding of design systems including foundations, tokens, components, governance and production translation.
• Experience at scale; worked on a system serving multiple products and teams.
• Strong systems thinking; know when to standardise or extend.
• Strong product thinking; design system as product for adoption and usability.
• Proven craft; strong interaction and visual design fundamentals at component and product level.
• Technical fluency; comfortable discussing APIs, tokens, platform behaviour and code implications.
• Mobile-first design across Android and iOS, plus responsive web.
• Accessibility and localisation experience; diverse users, languages and devices.
• Leadership; mentors designers and balances direction with critique.
• Influence without authority; build trust across teams.
• Strong communication; document well and facilitate cross-functional conversations.

Responsibilities

• Set the direction: define vision, principles and roadmap for Design Systems.
• Own architecture across foundations, tokens, components and patterns.
• Design for coherence across Android, iOS and web while enabling product needs.
• Balance shared foundation with product-specific requirements.
• Design for India at scale: languages, content lengths, devices, accessibility.
• Drive adoption by understanding how teams use and extend the system.
• Build a contribution model: enable designers and engineers to propose improvements.
• Partner with Design Systems Engineering to align Figma and production.
• Raise quality: ensure high interaction, visuals, accessibility and robustness.
• Improve docs, tooling and workflows for easier use.
• Build and grow the Design Systems team; develop system thinkers.
• Shape future: explore machine-readable aspects and AI-assisted workflows.

Skills

Product design

Design systems depth

Scale systems experience

Systems thinking

Product thinking

Craft fundamentals

Technical fluency

Mobile-first design

Accessibility & localization

Leadership experience

Influence without authority

Communication

Job description

Job Description:

Company Description

At PhonePe our vision is to provide financial inclusion to a billion Indians. Today we have made significant progress on this vision by making digital payments far simpler and ubiquitous than it has ever been. However, we wish to make it so easy, safe, and universally accepted that people never feel the need to carry cash or cards again. And not just in Urban India. At PhonePe, our aim is to transform the entire Indian landscape so that every Indian, in every corner of the country, makes significant economic progress. Onwards and upwards! That is our goal.

Job Description

If you are sold on the vision of the company, you may want to consider the design team as a place to make this a reality. The design team at PhonePe is a bunch of creative trailblazers who are leading the effort to make a dent in the fintech universe. The design team consists of Product Designers, Visual Designers, Graphic & Motion Designers, and Illustrators who are all engaged in blending art and science into a promising value proposition for our users.

About Design Systems at PhonePe

PhonePe today is much more than a single product. Our teams design across the PhonePe Consumer App, PhonePe Business, PhonePe Invest, PhonePe Appstore, and a growing ecosystem of products and experiences.

As these products grow independently, our Design System provides the shared foundation that keeps us coherent as an ecosystem while helping teams build faster and at a consistently high level of quality.

This is an interesting systems problem. The goal isn't to make every PhonePe product look the same. It's to figure out what should remain common across PhonePe, what should be flexible, and where individual products genuinely need to extend the system.

The Design Systems team owns the foundations, components, patterns, standards and tooling that make that possible across design and engineering.

The role

You’ll lead Design Systems horizontally across PhonePe.

You’ll own the direction of the system: its architecture, quality, adoption, governance and evolution and work closely with designers and engineers across PhonePe to make it better.

This is not a role for maintaining a Figma library from a distance. You’ll need to understand how the system is actually being used, get into the details when necessary, make difficult calls around standardisation and flexibility, and build the operating model that allows multiple product teams to contribute without fragmenting the system.

You’ll lead the Design Systems team and partner closely with Design Systems Engineering and design leaders across PhonePe.

What you’ll do

• Set the direction. Define the vision, principles and roadmap for Design Systems across PhonePe. Decide where we invest, what we standardise, and how the system needs to evolve as our products grow.

• Build a system, not a component library. Own the architecture across foundations, tokens, components and reusable product patterns. Think about how these work together across Android, iOS and web, not one component at a time.

• Design for the PhonePe ecosystem. Find the right balance between a shared PhonePe foundation and the needs of individual products. Create consistency where it adds leverage without forcing every product into the same mould.

• Design for India at scale. Make sure our foundations work across languages, content lengths, devices, accessibility needs and different levels of digital familiarity.

• Drive adoption. Understand why teams use, extend, detach or rebuild system components. Treat those behaviours as signals and make the system useful enough that teams want to build with it.

• Build the contribution model. Give designers and engineers across PhonePe a clear way to propose, contribute and improve shared patterns. Build governance that protects quality without turning the Design Systems team into the design police.

• Partner deeply with engineering. Work closely with Design Systems Engineering to keep Figma and production aligned. Be comfortable getting into conversations about component APIs, tokens, variants, implementation constraints, releases and migrations.

• Raise the quality bar. Hold a high standard for interaction, visual craft, accessibility and system quality. Make sure what enters the system is robust enough to work across products and at PhonePe's scale.

• Make the system easier to use. Improve documentation, tooling and workflows so designers and engineers can discover the right solution and use it without depending on the Design Systems team.

• Build the team. Manage and grow the designers in the Design Systems team. Develop strong systems thinkers and create the conditions for the team to balance foundational work with immediate product needs.

• Shape what comes next. Explore how the Design System can become increasingly machine-readable and power AI-assisted workflows across prototyping, design-to-code, automated audits and product development.

What we care about

We hire and grow people around three things: craft, context, and community.

• Craft - the quality of the system, the details behind it, and the judgement to know when something is ready to become a standard.

• Context - understanding the bigger picture: the user, the product, the technology, and the ecosystem a decision needs to work within.

• Community - building the relationships, contribution culture and shared ownership that allow a system to scale beyond the team that created it.

For Design Systems, we care deeply about subtractive thinking. A good system doesn't grow by endlessly adding components and variants. It gets better by finding the underlying pattern, removing unnecessary complexity and making the right things reusable.

Qualifications

We are looking for

• 6+ years in product design, with meaningful experience building, scaling or leading a mature design system.

• Real design systems depth. You've worked beyond Figma libraries and understand foundations, tokens, component architecture, patterns, governance and how systems translate into production.

• Experience at scale. You’ve worked on a system that serves multiple products, platforms, teams or business units — and understand the organisational complexity that comes with it.

• Strong systems thinking. You can spot common structures across seemingly different product problems and know when to standardise, when to extend and when an exception is genuinely necessary.

• Strong product thinking. You treat the Design System as a product for designers and engineers. You care about adoption, usability and outcomes, not the number of components shipped.

• Proven craft. You have strong interaction and visual design fundamentals and can hold a high quality bar at both the component and product level.

• Technical fluency. You don’t need to be an engineer, but you should be comfortable talking about component APIs, tokens, platform behaviour, versioning and how design decisions translate into code.

• Mobile-first experience. You’re comfortable designing systems across Android and iOS, with a good understanding of responsive web.

• Experience designing for accessibility and localisation. Ideally you’ve worked on products serving diverse users, languages and devices.

• Leadership experience. You’ve managed or mentored designers and can move between setting direction, giving detailed critique and helping people grow.

• Influence without authority. You’ll work with many teams you don’t manage. You need to build trust, make strong arguments and align people around decisions that are better for the system as a whole.

• Strong communication. You can explain complex system decisions clearly, write useful documentation and facilitate difficult cross-functional conversations.

Experience with large-scale consumer technology or fintech products, Android-first ecosystems, Design Systems Engineering, Figma APIs/plugins/MCP, design-to-code tooling, automated system auditing or AI-assisted product development is a strong advantage.

Additional Information

At PhonePe’s scale, a good system decision doesn’t improve one screen. It can improve hundreds of experiences across multiple products and influence the work of designers and engineers across the organisation.

Done well, the Design System becomes more than a source of consistency. It becomes infrastructure for product quality and velocity - helping teams solve common problems once, build on each other's work, and spend more of their time on the problems that are genuinely unique.

Design Microsite: https://design.phonepe.com/

Department Name: Design