Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

Company Description
Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. We build, power, and evolve the tools and technologies that connect millions of entrepreneurs with millions of buyers around the world. As an Etsy employee, you will tackle unique, meaningful, and large-scale problems alongside passionate coworkers, all the while making a rewarding impact and Keeping Commerce Human.

We believe exceptional companies are built by exceptional teams, and we're intentional about it. That means hiring great people, setting them up for success from day one, and giving them real reasons to grow their careers here. We invest in development that goes beyond promotions, and we foster the trust and relationships that help people do their best work together.

What’s the role?

Collage is Etsy's design system, and it's how quality ships at scale. Every buyer and seller surface across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter is built from it. As a Staff Product Designer on the Design Systems team within UX Platform, you will help drive growth and architecture of that system: how components are structured, how they compose, how they hold up across four platforms and two different sides of a marketplace, and how they get better over time.

This role sits at a specific moment. Collage has mature design language and token foundations, and much of the component library is built. The next phase is harder and more interesting: making the system opinionated rather than reactive, working with consumers to define pattern libraries, closing the gaps in how components are proposed, built, graduated, and retired, and working efficiently so a small team can operate and grow it at this scale.

How you work matters as much as what you build. We're looking for someone whose instinct is to work in the open — to write the decision down while making it, to bring the team into a hard problem rather than come back with the answer, to leave the reasoning behind and not just the result.

This is a full-time position reporting to the Senior Product Design Manager for Design Systems and UX AI Enablement.

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What’s this team like at Etsy?

The Design Systems team is a core part of our design organization and drives work across three surfaces: documentation, Figma libraries, and toolkit code. We work as a tight design-product-engineering pod, and we earn adoption rather than mandating it — the standing bar is "build it so good it's hard to ignore." That means we live close to the teams consuming our work, through office hours, migration partnership, project support, and we take quality personally.

We're a small, senior, opinionated group. Everyone here has a domain they own deeply and a shared obligation to make everyone else better at theirs. If you like systems problems that have scaled complexity attached (four platforms, a two-sided marketplace, a large existing codebase), and are looking to grow a mature system — you'll like it here.

The work you do will directly contribute to Etsy's mission of Keeping Commerce Human by enabling product teams to focus on solving customer problems while maintaining the unique, human-centered experience that defines Etsy.

What does the day-to-day look like?

- Architect the system. Refine component anatomy, API and composition models, variant strategies, and token structures. Make decisions that hold across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter, and know where cross-platform coherence matters versus where platform convention should win. Anticipate how the system needs to flex before the consuming teams ask.
- Refine the component lifecycle. Define how a component gets proposed, prioritized, designed, documented, graduated, and deprecated, and what "done" means at each stage. Close the gaps between one-off requests and durable system additions, including the path from product-team patterns into the system.
- Make the system operable at scale. Find the leverage in how we do our own work. Structure tokens, component metadata, and documentation so they can be operated on programmatically, so quality holds as the Etsy brand evolves. Use agentic tools like Cursor or Claude in your daily practice to prototype architecture, validate decisions before committing to them, and take manual work off the team's plate.
- Work in the open. Document decisions as you make them. Pull the team into architecture problems while they're still messy, and use critique to think rather than to approve.
- Drive adoption through craft. Use hands-on partnership with teams consuming Collage to understand where the system is failing them, fix the root cause, and make the on-system path the easiest one to take.
- Partner deeply with engineering. Work day to day with web and native engineering leads to make sure design decisions are implementable, token-backed, and performant. Engage early enough to influence what gets built rather than reviewing it after.
- Set and hold the quality bar. Champion accessibility, precision, and completeness across everything the system produces. Model what a finished component looks like — states, edge cases, content dimensions, localization, motion — and make that standard legible to the rest of the design org.
- Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.

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Qualities that will help you thrive in this role are:

- A portfolio showing design systems work at scale: component architecture, token systems, and delivery across web, iOS, and Android, where platform constraints differ and coherence is  a deliberate choice. We want to see the structure and the reasoning, not just the artifacts.
- Judgment about where the system should be opinionated and where it should stay flexible. You think in composition rather than accumulation — primitives that combine, not a new component for every case — and you treat the system as a quality floor that has to keep rising as product teams reach higher.
- Comfort flexing how you work to reach a quality result. Agentic tools like Cursor or Claude are one lever and you use them well, but the deeper requirement is understanding the coded medium and infrastructure you're designing into, enough to know what will hold up and what won't.
- A transparent way of working. You write things down, share reasoning, and open problems up instead of absorbing them. People around you get more capable as a byproduct of how you operate.
- Genuine comfort working with engineers. You can read a component implementation, hold a conversation about build constraints, and change your design because of what you learn.
- Strong visual craft and a rigorous eye for typography, color, space, and density as system-level decisions, with accessibility standards built into those decisions rather than bolted on afterward.
- The ability to operate in ambiguity, frame a poorly-defined problem, align stakeholders in a unified direction, and execute without a clear brief.
- Excellent communication and storytelling. You can walk leadership level audiences through why the system is structured the way it is, and walk an engineer through a token migration, with equal clarity.

As a Staff Designer, you will be expected to

- Lead cross-squad design objectives and provide strategic leadership that connects to UX Platform's overall strategy.
- Set visual and interaction standards that resolve complex problems across multiple surfaces and platforms.
- Contribute strategic improvements to the design system and drive adoption of new components and patterns.
- Help designers across the org adapt their work to fit existing patterns and platform conventions.
- Build prototypes that clarify direction and create organizational alignment.
- Work across the initiative to influence priorities and roadmaps, holding both near-term delivery and long-term system vision at once.
- Model giving and applying feedback in a way that raises the quality of work around you.
- Evolve the team's ways of working, intake process, and documentation practices.

Compensation & Benefits

In addition to salary, you'll be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family. Base salary is determined by your location, skills, and experience.

Etsy uses two geographic pay zones to reflect the labor markets where we compete for talent: one called Geo-1, covering the New York City metropolitan area, San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle metropolitan area, and one called Geo-2, covering all other U.S. locations. Salary ranges for this role vary by zone and are listed below.

Location

We prioritize candidates based within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn Office. Depending on proximity, we ask team members to come in once or twice per week. Remote candidates outside commutable distance may be considered on a case-by-case basis, with the expectation of occasional travel to the office. Learn more details about our work modes and workplace safety policies here .

Salary Range:
• Geo-1: 187,000.00 - 253,000.00 USD Annual
• Geo-2: 168,000.00 - 228,000.00 USD Annual


What's Next

If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please share your resume with us and feel free to include a cover letter if you'd like. As we hope you've seen already, Etsy is a place that values individuality and variety. We don't want you to be like everyone else -- we want you to be like you! So tell us what you're all about.

Our Promise

At Etsy, we believe that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace furthers relevance, resilience, and longevity. We encourage people from all backgrounds, ages, abilities, and experiences to apply. Etsy is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion or creed, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth and related medical conditions), gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, citizenship or immigration status, marital or familial status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military or veteran status**, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law**. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during any part of the interview or hiring process, please let your recruiter know and we will work with you to meet your needs. While Etsy supports visa sponsorship, sponsorship opportunities may be limited to certain roles and skills.