Senior Product Designer, Platforms & Foundations (Temporary)

Mission Overview & Responsibilities

The Games team at the New York Times is the group behind Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, the Daily Crossword, and more. We are looking for a temporary Senior Product Designer to help us establish and evolve our design systems across web and app experiences. The designer will create shared reusable interface patterns, find opportunities for consistency and quality, and set the team up with tools for success.

Responsibilities

• Help advance the platform-focused design systems roadmap with the Games Web & App Platform PM and engineering leads, identifying where foundational work (tokens, components, typography, layout) unlocks future product velocity.
• Contribute to and maintain Figma libraries and engineering documentation that map cleanly to our implemented component libraries, ensuring designers and engineers work from the same source of truth.
• Audit existing web and app experiences and component libraries to identify opportunities for consolidation, improvement, and systemization.
• Define and monitor design system health and adoption, identifying areas where teams may need guidance or additional support.
• Champion responsive, system-first design practices across the Games mission.
• Provide guidance to designers using the system, including critiques, pairing, and improving documentation so the system remains clear and useful across different games and surfaces.
• Be the standard-bearer for design quality across Games surfaces and system contributions.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications

• 4+ years of relevant design experience working within cross-functional teams.
• 3+ years experience working directly on design systems or platform/foundations work (components, tokens, patterns, or similar).
• A portfolio of work that showcases your thought process along with finished design work.
• Experience building, maintaining, and applying design systems in collaboration with engineering.
• Fluent in UX design best practices and usability principles that responsively scale across mobile and web platforms.
• Working knowledge of accessibility and inclusive design, especially as it applies to systems work (typography scales, contrast, motion, and semantics).
• Advanced proficiency in Figma or equivalent design software.

Preferred Qualifications

• You understand the constraints and opportunities of technologies used to build modern digital experiences.
• Experience with front end coding.
• Experience shaping team design practices (e.g., crits, documentation, templates) to move an organization toward more responsive, system-first work.
• Experience collaborating on foundational refactors with platform or infrastructure teams (for example, typography or color system overhauls, or migrations to new component libraries).
• Comfort working with engineers and understanding implementation tradeoffs – codified design intent through design tokens, component APIs, and reading through specs.
• Experience documenting and delivering UI screens and specifications to engineers.
• Advanced visual design skills, including typography, hierarchy, and layout.
• Enthusiastic about the big picture and the smallest micro-interactions.