Founding Design Systems Lead (AI)

Location: Remote, United States

Salary: $218K–$307K annually plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is building a developer-focused cloud platform for AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications, with persistent compute, autoscaling, orchestration, and observability.

What you will do

• Set the vision and direction for hirify.global's design system, deciding what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace.
• Build the foundations hands-on, including architecture, components, guidance, tokens, and quality standards.
• Partner with engineering on component APIs, theming, layered and headless patterns, agent access, performance, flexibility, and coherence.
• Make the design system AI-ready through machine-readable documentation, agent-accessible rules and tokens, MCP or similar access, and architecture that preserves brand and accessibility layers.
• Define repeatable evaluations for design quality and AI-generated output, and improve adoption by working with product teams and teaching through examples.
• Build and lead the design systems team as the function grows, including hiring, development, prioritization, feedback, and ownership.

Requirements

• Track record of setting direction and delivering outcomes in design systems or design engineering, with the ability to build a function from the ground up before leading a team.
• Exceptional visual and interaction design skills, including strong attention to detail and the ability to simplify complex experiences.
• Deep systems thinking and experience building systems adopted by other teams, improving both delivery speed and shipped quality.
• Strong technical fluency, including prototyping and building in code, frontend architecture, component API design, tokens, theming, and layered or headless patterns.
• Hands-on use of AI in design work and a clear point of view on AI-ready design systems, including how to improve AI output and serve machines as well as humans.
• Strong product judgment and developer empathy, with the ability to connect system decisions to real workflows and outcomes.

Nice to have

• Experience leading or developing designers or design engineers.
• Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage.
• Hands-on experience with machine-readable design-system documentation, MCP or similar agent access, layered or headless architecture, or evaluations for AI-generated output.
• Experience building developer or designer tools adopted into other teams' daily workflows.
• Experience leading a major design-system migration or 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.

Culture & Benefits

• Four weeks of paid vacation.
• Fourteen weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents, with return-to-work support.
• Long-term disability, life insurance, 401(k), fully employer-paid medical coverage, and employer-paid dental and vision coverage.
• FSAs, HSAs, monthly lifestyle, cell phone, internet, and remote home-office stipends; commuter benefits are available for Bay Area employees.
• Continuous learning benefits and support.
• Culture centered on integrity, humility, learning, thoughtful debate, feedback, trust, respect, craft, velocity, and user experience.

Hiring process

• The interview process is tailored to the role and designed to be thoughtful, respectful, and mindful of candidate time.