Responsibilities

How we build software is changing. Designers are prototyping in code, engineers are shipping polished interfaces, and agents are starting to build directly into the product. More people and more things can create software than ever before. That makes design judgment more important, not less.
We're looking for a Staff/Principal Founding Design Systems Lead to build that judgment into Render's foundations.
This isn't about maintaining a component library. It's about enabling designers, engineers, and agents to build experiences that look, feel, and work like Render, without a designer making every decision or the design systems team reviewing every change. At a company whose whole promise is a platform that just works, the design system is how we keep craft scaling as the product and the team grows.
This role starts hands-on. You're a designer first, with the technical depth to get into the code. You'll partner with the Head of Design to set the vision, then do the foundational work yourself: decide where or whether our Figma library lives and how it operates, get deep into what an AI-ready design system really means, and prototype, test, and ship the system in code. As the function grows, you'll build and lead the team around it. You're energized by building from the ground up, not inheriting something finished.
Here's what makes this role urgent and specific to us: our users are developers, and they're increasingly building with AI agents. That cuts both ways. Inside Render, teams reach for an agent before they check the docs — so a system that isn't legible to AI quietly gets bypassed, and quality drifts toward generic output. And externally, we're building the platform where developers deploy AI-native apps and agents. The person in this role treats the design system as infrastructure for humans, machines, and velocity and has a point of view on what that takes: machine-readable documentation, system rules exposed where agents can read them, an architecture that keeps the brand and accessibility layers ours, and evaluations that catch drift before it ships.
This role reports to the Head of Design.
This role is for you if you're excited by:
Making great design reproducible, by people and agents. Raise the quality of Render's product and encode what makes it good, so a designer, an engineer, or an agent can produce coherent, usable experiences by default. The system should make excellent work easier, not make every experience look the same.
Reimagining what a design system can be. Build beyond components and tokens into composition rules, interaction patterns, agent-readable guidance, and evaluations, so the fastest way to build is also a path to great quality.
Building and leading a team that multiplies everyone else's impact. Start hands-on, then create the direction, ambitious goals, and caring-but-demanding environment that let a team do the best work of their careers.
Set the system's vision and direction. Decide what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on what builders and customers need — and turn that into focused work, much of which you'll do yourself at first.
Build the foundations hands-on. Early on, you are the team: setting the architecture, shipping the components, writing the guidance, and establishing the quality bar through your own work before there's anyone to delegate to.

Qualification

Deep systems thinkingStrong technical fluencyHands-on use of AI in your workExperience building developer tools

Required

A track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering — and the appetite to build a function from the ground up before leading a team. You create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and keep momentum without dropping the quality bar. Experience leading or developing designers/design engineers is a strong plus, as this role grows in that area.
Exceptional visual and interaction design skills. Your work shows a clear point of view, detail that borders on obsessive, and an ability to make complex experiences feel simple — the kind of craft other practitioners admire.
Deep systems thinking, and experience building systems other teams actually adopt. You can show how your work improved both their speed and the quality of what shipped — not just that it existed.
Strong technical fluency. You can prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture (component API design, tokens, theming, layered/headless patterns), and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers — not just hand off specs.
Hands-on use of AI in your work, and a real point of view on AI-ready design systems. You understand where AI helps and where it fails, how to improve its output rather than accept it, and what it takes for a system to serve machines as well as humans. You don't need to have shipped all of it, but you should be able to say where you'd start and why.
Strong product judgment and developer empathy. You stay close to the people who use what you build and connect system decisions to real workflows and outcomes. Fluency with developers and technical products is a strong plus — our users are engineers, and the system has to serve them and the agents they build with.

Preferred

Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage.
Hands-on experience making a design system AI-ready: machine-readable documentation, MCP or similar agent access, layered/headless architecture, or evaluation frameworks for AI-generated output.
Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams' daily workflow.
Experience leading a major design-system migration or a company-wide change in how teams build.
Experience evolving a system across platforms, or connecting product and brand experiences.
Founder or early-stage startup experience.
If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need.

Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead at Render · LumiJobs

Staff/Principal Design Systems Lead

Responsibilities

Qualification

Required

Preferred

Benefits

Company

Render

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