Senior Product Designer: Design Systems

Do you dream about creating a more sustainable future? At Uplight, we are motivating energy users and providers to accelerate the clean energy ecosystem. Working with over 80 of the world's leading electric and gas utilities, Uplight provides an end-to-end customer energy experience. Uplight delivers personalized experiences that customers have now come to expect-improving satisfaction, increasing revenue, reducing the cost to serve, and contributing to carbon reduction goals. We are B Corp certified, enabling us to put our values into action by not only making decisions for the benefit of our shareholders, but also for our customers, environment, employees, and community.

As a Senior Product Designer - Design Systems, you will lead the strategic evolution, governance, and architecture of Uplight's core design system. You will step into an influential leadership role at the intersection of Design, Engineering, and Product Strategy-building a unified, accessible, and AI-optimized component architecture from the ground up to empower every product team across Uplight.

What You'll Do

• Drive the evolution of Uplight's design system by delivering high-quality visual assets-UI mockups, icons, illustrations, design tokens, and component specifications-that set the gold standard for visual consistency, craft, and accessibility across all products.
• Partner directly with cross-functional leadership and your team to establish a clear strategy, roadmap, and prioritization framework for Uplight's design system, driving widespread adoption across all product lines.
• Audit, refine, and construct scalable UI components, design tokens, responsive layouts, and interaction patterns. Uncover opportunities to unify implementations across responsive and accessible surfaces.
• Collaborate closely with frontend engineering teams to ensure component structures, token naming, auto-layout rules, and variants directly mirror production code structure.
• Partner closely with UX product designers, product managers, and UI engineers to validate, scale, and ship design solutions that work seamlessly across responsive and accessible surfaces.
• Create clear documentation and usage guidance, including best practices, anti-patterns, and decision frameworks teams can act on.
• Establish clear contribution models, version control practices, and governance processes-including facilitating a company-wide working sessions-so designers across all products can continuously contribute without breaking system cohesion.
• Partner with engineering to explore and implement responsible AI tooling and automated workflows to optimize the design-to-code pipeline.
• Champion Accessibility, ensuring every component and interaction pattern adheres to WCAG AA accessibility standards by default.
• Host regular co-design sessions, training workshops, and office hours to educate product managers, engineers, and designers on system updates, best practices, and contribution patterns.
• Champion a culture of continuous learning, feedback, and iteration.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of experience in digital product design, with a proven track record of creating, scaling, and maintaining enterprise-grade design systems in B2B or B2B2C software environments.
• High Design Craft & Component Execution: Deep expertise in component design, variants, interaction patterns, responsive layouts, micro-interactions, and visual design fundamentals.
• Exceptional standards for visual design and component work, delivering polished, production-ready UI components engineered to scale across complex software ecosystems.
• Expert proficiency in Figma advanced capabilities, including variables, design tokens, component properties, auto-layout, and library publishing workflows.
• Technical Fluency: Strong familiarity with frontend capabilities (React, Angular, Material UI / MUI) and component architecture to ensure seamless collaboration with engineering partners.
• Strong communication and storytelling skills. Ability to articulate the "why" behind system decisions, with a track record of producing clear, and actionable usage guidelines.
• Facilitation Skills. Experience establishing multi-team contribution frameworks and leading collaborative workshops that build cross-functional trust and drive alignment across the organization.
• Deep knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG AA) and a commitment to ensure all components and patterns are inclusive and usable.

Bonus points

• Comfortable jumping into complex technical domains with curiosity and humility.
• Experience in leveraging modern AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Figma MCP, automated spec-to-code generators) to streamline design system maintenance and deployment.
• Experience writing or governing component usage documentation at scale.
• Fluency in Agile environments, meeting cadences, etc.

Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women, marginalized genders and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Uplight we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

What makes working at Uplight amazing

We are:

• Proud to be over 500+ purpose-driven individuals helping to create a more sustainable planet.
• Committed to the environment, our employees, and our communities.
• Focused on providing cross-functional work, collaboration, and development.
• Committed to taking our work and mission seriously and....we love to laugh!