Staff Product Design - Growth Design Language & Experience Systems

OVERVIEW

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We’re a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

We’re hiring a Staff Product Designer to elevate the end to end experience across Instacart’s Growth ecosystem, connecting how customers discover, evaluate, commit to, and build an ongoing relationship with Instacart.

This role exists to bridge product design and the design language system, ensuring new ideas evolve and strengthen the living and breathing design system. This role places a strong emphasis on visual craft and design language. Key accountabilities will include defining and evolving how Instacart’s experiences look and feel across Growth, shaping a cohesive, high quality design language through real product work. This includes setting direction and application of new and existing UI patterns, component design, hierarchy, motion, and overall interaction quality across surfaces.

You will primarily operate as a flex designer on the Growth design team, embedding within work tracks to elevate craft and system thinking, while also stepping in to lead high impact projects end to end when needed.

About The Role

Daily Rhythms and Samples of Work:

• Embed within a product pillar to support high impact initiatives across Growth, providing additional craft, refinement, and system thinking across key journeys such as incentives, subscriptions, and lifecycle experiences, and stepping in to lead projects end to end when needed.
• Act as a bridge between product teams and the design system, ensuring new components and patterns are thoughtfully explored, validated, and integrated back into the system without fragmentation.
• Partner with product designers to explore and develop new interaction patterns, modules, and components before scaling them across the system.
• Evolve the design language through product work, shaping components, patterns, and interaction models that scale across surfaces and teams.
• Define and refine UI components, layouts, and patterns with a high level of craft, ensuring clarity, hierarchy, and consistency across complex, content rich environments.
• Set a high bar for visual quality and interaction design, influencing how interfaces look, feel, and behave across the product.
• Drive cohesion, continuity, and consistency across end to end journeys, ensuring experiences feel connected and intuitive.
• Accountable for cohesion, continuity, and system integrity across key journeys, ensuring new work strengthens rather than fragments the overall experience.
• Elevate visual and UI craft across surfaces, with exceptional attention to hierarchy, typography, spacing, motion, and overall interaction quality.
• Provide deep refinement on high impact initiatives, bringing additional craft and polish to moments that matter most.
• Drive work from concept to interactive experience to refinement and build, ensuring ideas are both high quality and executable.
• Act as an accelerant for product teams, elevating the quality, clarity, and craft of work across initiatives.
• Step in to lead high impact initiatives end to end when needed, driving clarity, alignment, and execution across cross functional partners.
• Introduce and evolve new ways of working across design, product, and engineering, using shared artifacts to improve clarity, speed, and alignment.

What Success Looks Like

• Experiences feel cohesive, consistent, and connected to a clear and differentiated design language.
• The design language evolves through product work, with new components and patterns integrated without fragmentation.
• Product teams move faster and produce higher quality work through your support.
• You raise the bar for visual craft and interaction quality across teams.
• You act as an accelerant, improving both speed and clarity of execution.
• The work you contribute to drives measurable impact on adoption, engagement, and retention.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years designing consumer-facing digital products across web and mobile, with a portfolio demonstrating complex, multi-step journeys, system-level thinking, and integration across product and lifecycle channels (e.g. CRM, campaigns, social).
• Deep experience in systems thinking with experience working on or closely with design language systems or foundations teams, with the ability to translate system principles into real product experiences.
• Exceptional visual design and UI craft, with a strong sense of taste and attention to detail, and experience defining or evolving design language systems in high quality consumer products.
• Strong point of view on visual systems, interaction patterns, and how design language creates differentiation and emotional resonance.
• Experience operating as a bridge across product and systems, helping teams explore new ideas while maintaining cohesion and scalability.
• Proven track record of navigating ambiguity and influencing across multi-team environments, connecting fragmented efforts into cohesive strategies and outcomes.
• Comfortable embedding within product teams while maintaining accountability to broader system integrity.
• Experience using interactive, end to end experiences, not just static designs, as a primary tool for storytelling, alignment, and decision making.
• Strong communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence direction and align cross functional teams.
• Fluent in Figma and Google Slides, using them to communicate ideas clearly and drive alignment.
• Base knowledge of emerging AI tools with a strong interest and comfort experimenting with new methods on a daily basis. The team is primarily leveraging Claude with an active Design Lab that experiments with additional tools ranging from motion design, image creation and code driven design prototypes. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for marketplaces, e-commerce, grocery, CPG, or subscription products, especially in environments where lifecycle, growth, and repeat behavior are critical.
• Experience shaping onboarding, activation, and retention experiences, with a strong understanding of how incentives, perceived value, and personalization drive behavior and long-term loyalty.
• Familiarity with domains such as meal planning, nutrition, health goals, and personalization, and how they intersect with household grocery behavior.
• Experience designing high-visibility surfaces such as home, personalized feeds, and merchandising placements, with a strong point of view on hierarchy, density, and visual clarity in complex, content rich environments.
• Experience working within and evolving large scale design systems, ensuring new components and patterns align to system principles while elevating overall craft and cohesion.
• Comfort operating across distributed, cross functional teams, influencing multi-team initiatives and connecting work into cohesive, system-level outcomes without direct authority.

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