Staff Product Designer - Shopping Experiences

About the job

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone. This role bridges product design and the design language system, ensuring new ideas evolve and strengthen the living, breathing system rather than fragment it.

Key accountabilities

• Define and evolve how Instacart's shopping experiences look and feel
• Shap a cohesive, high-quality design language through real product work
• Set direction and application of new and existing UI patterns, component design, hierarchy, motion, and overall interaction quality across surfaces
• Elevate visual and interaction quality, refining interaction patterns, and ensuring system integrity across browse, search, item detail, cart, and checkout
• Lead high-impact initiatives end to end when needed, from problem framing and exploration through interactive prototyping, delivery, and launch

What success looks like

• Experiences feel cohesive, consistent, and connected to a clear and differentiated design language
• The design language evolves through product work, with new components and patterns integrated without fragmentation
• Product teams move faster and produce higher quality work through your support
• You raise the bar for visual craft and interaction quality across teams
• You act as an accelerant, improving both speed and clarity of execution
• The work you contribute to drives measurable impact on adoption, engagement, and retention

Qualifications

• 15+ years designing consumer-facing digital products across web and mobile, with a portfolio demonstrating complex, multi-step transactional journeys and system-level thinking across high-density catalog surfaces
• Deep experience in systems thinking with experience working on or closely with design language systems or foundations teams, with the ability to translate system principles into real product experiences
• Exceptional visual design and UI craft, with a strong sense of taste and attention to detail, and experience defining or evolving design language systems in high quality consumer products
• Experience working in an agency or client-facing environment, with a proven ability to navigate multiple stakeholders, translate briefs into high-quality design work, and deliver under real-world constraints
• Strong point of view on visual systems, interaction patterns, and how design language creates differentiation and emotional resonance
• Experience operating as a bridge across product and systems, helping teams explore new ideas while maintaining cohesion and scalability
• Proven track record of navigating ambiguity and influencing across multi-team environments, connecting fragmented efforts into cohesive strategies and outcomes
• Comfortable embedding within product teams while maintaining accountability to broader system integrity
• Experience using interactive, end to end experiences, not just static designs, as a primary tool for storytelling, alignment, and decision making
• Strong communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence direction and align cross functional teams
• Freshman in Figma and Google Slides, using them to communicate ideas clearly and drive alignment
• Base knowledge of emerging AI tools with a strong interest and comfort experimenting with new methods on a daily basis