Staff Product Designer (Group Practices)

Headway; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Headway is rebuilding Helix and seeks a second designer for Design Systems, partnering closely with our design systems lead. You lead with design, visual craft, and systems thinking, setting a high bar for quality.

You’ll understand how tokens are structured, component APIs, and will be comfortable building simpler components in React and Tailwind while shipping Figma library components with variants.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing digital products
• Experience with design systems used by multiple teams
• Strong typography, spacing, color, and density skills
• Ability to unblock others and identify gaps in the system
• Excellent documentation and communication

Responsibilities

• Design flexible, scalable components with clear specs
• Shape semantic token architecture and theming
• Write and maintain design-system documentation
• Collaborate with product teams to plan migrations of components
• Champion accessibility across Helix design system

Skills

Design systems

Visual craft

Systems thinking

Typography

Density & spacing

Documentation

Accessibility

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Figma

React

Tailwind

Job description

• Our design team works AI-first. Designers use Claude Code and Claude Design to prototype and stay involved through launch and iteration. We want to build a design system that empowers teams to use Helix with AI tooling, and think differently about how we build a system to support AI first workflows
• We’re currently rebuilding Helix from the ground up this year across all our tokens, components, and documentation. This is an exciting moment to shape the new direction for how Helix evolves
• You’ll be the second designer on Design Systems, partnering closely with our design systems lead. You’re someone who holds a high bar on design craft and has the technical depth to back it up. You lead with design: visual craft, systems thinking, and a point of view on quality
• You also understand how the system gets built, from the way tokens are structured to how a component API holds up once every product team is building on it. You feel at home in React and Tailwind, and you’re comfortable building the simpler components yourself
• Component design: Design flexible, scalable components and hold the bar on typography, spacing, color, states, and density. Ship specs an engineer can build from without a follow-up meeting, and Figma library components with variants and properties wired up
• Tokens and theming: Shape the semantic token architecture and the theming spec that maps it across surfaces with very different needs, from a consumer marketplace to a dense internal ops tool
• Documentation: Write documentation a designer, an engineer, and a coding agent can each act on
• Partnership with product teams: Work with product designers and engineers on their design system needs, advocate for the right ways to use Helix, and write the migration plans teams follow when a component changes shape
• Accessibility: Champion accessibility and hold Helix to that bar

You like making the system legible. Clear documentation and well-chosen patterns are how you scale your own workYou lead on visual craft and advocate for it across the team. Typography, spacing, color, states, and density are the details you care about getting right5+ years designing digital products, including at least two on a design system used by multiple teamsYou’re energized by being the person who unblocks others, and you can tell the difference between a one-off request and a signal about a gap in the system