Design Systems Lead: Architect, Code, and Scale

Perplexity AI; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI is seeking a Design Systems Lead to own and scale a semantic token system across mobile, web, and React surfaces. You’ll balance design craft with engineering practicality, mainly in GitHub while staying fluent in Figma to keep teams in sync.

You’ll define governance, document components and tokens, and drive adoption through onboarding, office hours, and hands-on support; accessibility and theming are defaults in the system.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience driving design systems at large organizations.
• Fluency in Figma with GitHub ownership to keep design and engineering aligned.
• Experience designing semantic tokens and scalable component APIs.
• Mentoring designers and engineers in a design-systems practice.
• Familiarity with WCAG accessibility and theming as defaults.

Responsibilities

• Own and bootstrap a semantic token system across platforms.
• Own the design system repo on GitHub and manage versioning and changelog.
• Set visual quality and technical standards for the system.
• Bridge Figma and code to keep the system coherent end-to-end.
• Define governance and contribution models for multi-team design systems.
• Document components and tokens and drive adoption through onboarding.

Skills

Design systems leadership

Cross-functional partnering

Figma fluency

GitHub ownership

Semantic tokens

Accessibility WCAG

React UI practices

Mentoring

Tools

GitHub

Figma

Storybook

Job description

Perplexity AI is seeking a Design Systems Lead to own and scale a semantic token system across mobile, web, and React surfaces. You’ll balance design craft with engineering practicality, mainly in GitHub while staying fluent in Figma to keep teams in sync.

You’ll define governance, document components and tokens, and drive adoption through onboarding, office hours, and hands-on support; accessibility and theming are defaults in the system.