Design Systems Lead

About the role We're seeking a Design Systems Lead with extensive experience owning design systems at large organizations.

You'll bootstrap an intuitive semantic token system that supports design and product teams across multiple platforms and frameworks - the foundation that keeps Perplexity's product coherent as we scale. This is a true 50/50 design-engineer role.

You'll live primarily in GitHub, where you own the system's repo, while staying fluent in Figma so design and engineering never drift apart. You'll set the bar for visual quality and the technical standards that let feature teams move fast without fragmenting the experience.

You'll work at the intersection of design and engineering, partnering with product feature teams across mobile, web, and React surfaces.

What you'll do Bootstrap and own an intuitive semantic token system that works across multiple platforms and frameworks Own the design system repo on GitHub: the source of truth for components, tokens, and standards, including versioning, release management, and a clear changelog Set and uphold a high bar for visual design quality across every surface the system touches Navigate the nuanced differences between mobile, web, and React UI best practices, and encode them into the system Define and run the contribution model and governance: review and shepherd inbound contributions from product feature teams, keeping quality and consistency high as the system grows Keep design and engineering in sync, bridging Figma and code so the system stays coherent end-to-end Own clear, first-class documentation so teams can adopt components and tokens on their own, and drive adoption across the org through onboarding, office hours, and hands-on support Bake in accessibility (WCAG) and theming (including dark mode) as defaults, not afterthoughts Maintain a system roadmap, balancing net-new work, migrations, and deprecations against feature-team needs Bring new AI tooling into the design systems workflow and help sha