Hybrid Staff Product Designer, Patterns

at Zigsaw

• Job title: Staff Product Designer, Patterns
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: $158,765 - $326,870 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Staff Product Designer specializing in design systems for Pinterest. Leading design quality and empowering teams with strategic advice and hands-on collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Drive System Quality: Lead the stewardship, evolution, and adoption of our core design patterns, component libraries, and gestalt subsystems—ensuring cohesive, delightful, and accessible user experiences at scale.
• Partner Horizontally: Act as a strategic advisor and a hands-on partner to product, engineering, and design teams across Personalisation and core surfaces, empowering them to leverage best-in-class patterns and ship with confidence.
• Advance Systemic Thinking: Apply methodical, systematic approaches to pattern creation: balancing product usability, craft, accessibility, and business needs—with input from a wide range of stakeholders.
• Prototype & Technologize: Rapidly visualize, prototype, and validate new ideas; translate abstract solutions into practical, scalable patterns using Figma, code, AI, or whatever is needed to inspire clarity and adoption.
• Uphold and Elevate Craft: Conduct quality audits, review flows and handoffs, and directly contribute hands-on design when needed—always advocating for the highest standards.
• Mentor & Scale Impact: Inspire and guide other designers in craft, systemic thinking, and best practices through critique, guidance, and sharing your expertise across teams.
• Champion Accessibility & Inclusion: Ensure our design systems support diverse user needs and raise the bar on inclusion and accessibility from the ground up.
• Communicate & Influence: Clearly articulate your design thinking, rationale, and vision—presenting work to teams, leaders, and executives, and rallying consensus.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in design, a related field or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience in product design, with significant time spent driving or evolving design systems or pattern libraries.
• Portfolio demonstrating polished interface design, systemic thinking, component-based UIs, and tangible influence across large organizations.
• Track record in staff/principal-level roles, influencing horizontally, upholding design quality, and partnering cross-functionally—ideally in large-scale consumer or platform environments.
• Design technologist mindset: Comfortable experimenting with Figma prototypes, AI, and (optionally) front-end code; curious and opinionated about technical feasibility, accessibility, and how we can streamline design workflows and processes through systems and tools.
• Excellent communicator who can synthesize ambiguity into actionable design problems and unite teams through clarity, documentation, and collaboration.
• Growth mindset with a passion for ongoing learning, experimentation, and mentoring others.
• Demonstrated commitment to inclusion, accessibility, and crafting systems that serve diverse audiences.
• Experience leading platform-wide or multi-product design system initiatives.
• Familiarity with personalization, large consumer apps, or rapid scale environments.
• Contributions to public design systems, open-source libraries, or industry talks/writing.

Benefits

• Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.