Lead Product Designer - Design Systems

Cox Automotive; Kansas City (MO); On-site; USD 112,000 - 186,000; Full time

Job summary

Cox Automotive in the United States seeks a Lead Product Designer to own the Interstate design system and the shared foundation for Cox Automotive B2B products. You will be the senior-most design voice for Interstate, guiding components, tokens, and patterns across teams.

You will work with product managers, designers, engineers, and the broader org to enable faster, higher‑quality design and AI-assisted tooling. Strong communication and a bias toward shipping with quality are essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree + 6 years of related experience.
• Systems thinker who explains patterns and governance across products.
• Obsessed with craft and quality in visuals and interactions.
• High agency and ability to influence without tickets or prompts.
• Biased toward shipping while maintaining quality.
• Clear communicator and teacher who documents decisions clearly.
• Fluent with AI-assisted design and design-system tooling.
• Accessible by default with WCAG-focused mindset.
• Outcome-driven with measurable design impact.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve Interstate: guidelines, tokens, components, reusable patterns.
• Set design direction for ambiguous features aligned to product value.
• Define quality bar for design execution, accessibility and usability.
• Create cross-product interaction and visual patterns for multiple user types.
• Define rules for contribution, versioning and deprecation in the system.
• Shape design side of Interstate AI tooling and agent-based UIs.
• Identify gaps, propose fixes, communicate changes across org.
• Mentor other designers through critique and established standards.

Skills

Systems thinker

Craft and quality

High agency

Clear communicator

AI-assisted design

Accessible by default

Outcome driven

Lead design direction

Education

Bachelor's degree in related discipline

Master's degree +4 years experience

Ph.D. +1 year experience

10 years experience

Tools

Figma variables

Style Dictionary

React

HTML/CSS

Job description

About the Team

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.

About the Role

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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

Who You Are

• 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.
• A systems thinker. You understand the layer beneath the screens: token architecture, components and their states, patterns other people adopted, a contribution or governance model. You can explain why a pattern exists, when to break it, and how one decision cascades across products.
• Obsessed with craft and quality in visuals and interactions. You sweat the border radius, the focus ring, the token name, the state nobody thought to design. You believe a design system's job is to raise the floor for quality everywhere.
• High agency and high influence. You do not wait for a ticket, and you are energized by problems that don't have established solutions yet. You get involved upstream, where product direction is still forming, and shape it before decisions harden, moving designers, engineers, and senior stakeholders alike through clarity rather than authority. "Lead" is the operative word.
• Biased toward shipping. You know when to polish and when to ship. You use every tool at your disposal to move fast without sacrificing the quality your teammates depend on.
• A clear communicator and teacher. Systems work is advocacy, documentation, and helping others succeed. You can make the case to designers and engineers alike, and you can teach the reasoning behind your taste so it outlives any single decision.
• Fluent with AI-assisted design. You already work with AI tooling and agent-based workflows, and you have a point of view on what a design system owes them: what agents need from components, tokens, and documentation to compose UIs correctly.
• Accessible by default. You have a strong grasp of WCAG and hands-on experience designing and testing for assistive technologies.
• Outcome driven. You connect design decisions to outcomes and can show whether a change moved something.

Nice to Haves

• Leading or contributing to a widely adopted or open-source design system, including the ongoing stewardship: change management, support, office hours, and reviews.
• Depth with Figma variables, theming, and token pipelines such as Style Dictionary, and how design connects to code.
• Have created AI tooling for design: agents, MCP, context, and prompt-based workflows.
• Experience implementing design decisions in code (React, web components, HTML/CSS) or enough technical know-how to collaborate deeply with engineers.

USD 111,500.00 - 185,900.00 per year

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $111,500.00 - $185,900.00. 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.

Benefits

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company's needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.

EOE, including disability/vets