The opportunity
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.
What you'll do
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.
Build and lead the team that owns the system. As the function grows, hire and: develop it — set priorities and ownership, give direct feedback, hold a high bar, and help people do the best work of their careers.
Elevate Render's visual and interaction design. Raise the bar for typography,: hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility — and the states beyond the happy path, which is where developer tools earn their reputation.
Make the system legible to AI, not just humans. Lead the work to make: Render's design system AI-ready: machine-readable documentation, system rules and tokens exposed where agents can reach them (e.g. via MCP), and an architecture that shrinks the context an agent needs while keeping the brand and accessibility layers ours. The goal: agents building on Render produce on-brand, compliant work by default.
Guide technical architecture with engineering. Shape everything from: components and tokens to how agents discover guidance and check their work. Make sound tradeoffs between flexibility, coherence, performance, and ease of use — layered and headless where that scales better than rigid bundles.
What they're looking for
- 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.