Design Systems Lead

Perplexity is looking for a Design Systems Lead to own and bootstrap a semantic token system, ensuring coherence across design and engineering teams. This role requires a balance of design and engineering skills, primarily working in GitHub and Figma. 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.

• •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 shape how we build systems in an AI-native way
• •Operate with autonomy in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment