Sr. Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

Kong is building the future of AI connectivity and API management. We're hiring a Sr. Staff Product Designer, Design Systems to define and own the visual and interaction language for our entire platform — and to make sure that language actually shows up, consistently and beautifully, in what customers use every day.

You'll join our ~20-person Product Design team, reporting to the VP of Design, as the design lead for our design system. This is a hands-on craft role: you'll be the one setting the visual bar, building the components and templates other designers build from, and staying close enough to the product to know when the system is working and when it isn't.

You'll work alongside a Design Technologist, who owns our AI prototyping tooling and the Figma ↔ code bridge with engineering. You'll collaborate with them regularly — especially on how the design system shows up in prototyping tools and coded components.

What you'll do

Define our visual language

• Own the visual design direction of our design system — color, type, spacing, elevation, motion — with an eye for beauty and delight, not just function

Sweat the details

• Set and maintain a level of craft and polish that raises the bar for the whole design team
• Think through every component's states, variants, and edge cases across the range of ways it'll actually get used
• Keep the system meticulously organized and documented so it's genuinely easy for other designers to find and use
• Build in accessibility from the start — support things like our high contrast mode, and partner with engineering on how components should be implemented to meet accessibility standards (WCAG and beyond)
• Own the evolution of our design tokens, color themes, and foundational styling to ensure a cohesive, scalable, and visually compelling design system.

Build for real usage and scale

• Design and maintain page templates and layout patterns that give designers a consistent, high-quality starting point — especially around layout, spacing, and hierarchy between components
• Partner with our Design Technologist on how the system translates into our AI prototyping kit and Figma ↔ code workflows
• Be accountable to the real, live product — success is a beautiful, cohesive, modern, high-quality customer-facing UI, not a pristine system that designers quietly detach from or engineers bypass.

Enable the team

• Run office hours, be engaged in critiques, and stay embedded enough in day-to-day design work to know how the system is actually being used
• Write clear guidance and examples — not just "here's the component," but which component or variation fits which use case, with do's/don'ts and worked examples
• Help designers navigate ambiguous situations where more than one pattern could reasonably apply
• Mentor and coach designers across the team on systems thinking and craft

Own cohesion

• Actively track down drift between the system and what's shipped, and partner with engineering on a backlog to close the gap
• Look for opportunities to merge, simplify, or improve existing patterns in the product

What you'll bring

• 8+ years of product design experience, including significant time owning or co-owning a design system at scale
• Exceptional modern visual design craft — you can point to work you're genuinely proud of, and you have strong, well-reasoned opinions about type, color, spacing, and motion
• A detail-oriented, organized approach to systems work — you naturally think in states, variants, and edge cases
• Solid working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and experience partnering with engineers on accessible component implementation, including things like high contrast support
• A track record of enabling a team of designers — through documentation, critique, office hours, or direct coaching — not just building components in isolation
• A bias toward the shipped product over the theoretical system: you'd rather chase down real-world drift than polish a spec no one uses
• Comfort partnering directly with engineering on implementation tradeoffs and component APIs, and leading a roadmap of design system work
• Strong communication skills — you can write guidance that's actually clear, and you can hold your ground on craft while staying easy to work with
• Comfort collaborating on AI-assisted prototyping and Figma ↔ code workflows is a plus — this role isn't the primary owner of that tooling (we have a Design Technologist for that), but you'll be working closely with whoever is

Portfolio expectations

A portfolio, site, and/or repo demonstrating:

• Strong, modern visual and interaction design craft
• Design system work: component libraries, templates, or pattern documentation you've built or significantly evolved
• Evidence of enabling other designers — guidance docs, do's/don'ts, critique or office hours artifacts
• Accessibility considerations reflected in real component or system decisions
• Examples of driving a system change all the way through to a shipped, cohesive product outcome