Sr Product Designer, Design Systems Foundations

The opportunity

Are you passionate about solving design problems at scale, and crafting simple and elegant solutions for complex problems? Adobe Design is seeking a Product Designer to join Document Cloud Foundations and work on the design system.

Your work will ultimately benefit millions of Adobe customers — helping Adobe’s designers and engineering teams deliver great products and services.

As a senior team member, you’ll participate in key technical planning activities, such as feature discovery, system architecture, requirements definition, project scope, and delivery expectations. Team members participate in key planning activities, such as feature discovery, system architecture, requirements definition, project scope, and delivery.

What you’ll do

• 0→1 design system efforts for an emerging team within Document Cloud, defining system architecture, foundational primitives, components, and scalable patterns.
• Design, document, and maintain reusable UI components, interaction patterns, and guidelines that ensure consistency and quality across products.
• Partner closely with engineering to align on implementation strategies, tokens, and component APIs.
• Establish and evolve design system principles, standards, and contribution models to support long-term scalability and governance.
• Audit existing product experiences to identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and opportunities for systematization.
• Collaborate with product designers to translate product requirements into flexible, extensible system solutions.
• Champion accessibility, inclusivity, and performance as core principles within the design system.
• Mentor other designers on systems thinking, component design, and best practices for working with a design system.

What you need to succeed

Must-haves:

• 5+ years of experience in product design, with a strong portfolio demonstrating experience designing or contributing to a design system at scale and cross-platform.
• Familiarity with design tokens, theming, and scalable styling systems.
• Experience collaborating on or contributing to component libraries (e.g., Storybook, Figma libraries, or similar tools).
• Understanding of accessibility standards (WCAG) and how to apply them systematically across components.
• A history of close collaboration with design, product management, software development, and users from ideation through implementation.
• Strong documentation skills, with an ability to create clear, scalable guidance for diverse audiences.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, evolving spaces, especially early-stage system work.

Nice-to-haves:

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate a multi-level problem space and strategy behind design decisions to stakeholders of all levels.
• Working knowledge of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or frameworks like React) and how design systems are implemented in code.
• Experience defining governance models, contribution workflows, or adoption strategies for design systems.
• Experience influencing without authority across multiple teams and product areas.
• Experience measuring and improving design system adoption and impact.

Preferred Accessibility Design Skills:

• Experience designing accessible and inclusive interfaces for people with disabilities.
• Understanding of applying WCAG conformance criteria in design, specifically testing comps, wireframes, and prototypes for accessibility standards.
• Accessibility certifications CPACC, WAS, CPWA, or ADS from the IAAP preferred.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $124,600 -- $234,250 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.

At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).

In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.

State-Specific Notices:

California:

Fair Chance Ordinances

Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

Colorado:

Application Window Notice

If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.

Massachusetts:

Massachusetts Legal Notice

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.