Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

<div class="content-intro"><p>Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.</p></div><p>Product Design at Affirm drives business success by exceeding user’s expectations. We are a collaborative, remote-first team that is driven, highly skilled, and humble. We are looking for an experienced <strong>Staff Product Designer</strong> to join our team at a critical juncture <strong>to evolve our operational frameworks, mature our visual language, and champion a unified experience across our consumer and merchant products.</strong></p> <p>The Design Systems team is a small group of systems thinkers and connectors focused on the cohesive strategy of building, scaling, maturing, and improving our Design System. As Affirm scales, the Design System is an integral piece of ensuring a premium, elegant, consistent, trustworthy, delightful experience for our users.</p> <h2><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Strategic Architecture:</strong> Be a visual and technical architect of Affirm’s Design System. You will move beyond simple component creation to help define and grow the logic, token strategy, and governance that powers our products.</li> <li><strong>Visual Evolution:</strong> Lead the refinement of the visual language of the Affirm Design System. Design scalable systems and frameworks with a focus on clarity, performance, high craft, and visual luster.</li> <li><strong>Cross-Platform Parity:</strong> Deeply understand the user experience to remove discrepancies across Web, iOS, and Android. You will ensure our system feels native to each platform while remaining distinctly "Affirm."</li> <li><strong>Operational Excellence:</strong> Collaborate, author and maintain detailed documentation and usage guidelines. You will help grow the "source of truth" that reduces friction for product teams.</li> <li><strong>Collaboration & Bridge Building:</strong> Serve as a primary translator between Design and Engineering. You will work closely with Staff/Principal Engineers to align on API structures for components and token implementation.</li> <li><strong>Evangelism & Education:</strong> Be an internal expert and ambassador for the Design System. You will host office hours, run workshops, and actively mentor senior and mid-level designers on systems thinking.</li> <li><strong>Metrics & Analysis:</strong> Analyze the internal (efficiency) and external (user impact/performance) success of system components. You will define how we measure the ROI of our design system.</li> <li><strong>Accessibility Leadership:</strong> Champion inclusive design standards (WCAG 2.1 AA+), ensuring that accessibility is baked into the core of our components, not treated as an afterthought.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What We Look For</strong></h2> <p><strong>Systems Mastery & Technical Fluency</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Advanced Figma Expertise:</strong> You are a power user. You have deep mastery of Auto-layout, Component Properties, Variables (modes, aliasing), and library management. You know how to structure files for scale.</li> <li><strong>Design Token Strategy:</strong> Experience architecting semantic naming conventions and token taxonomies that bridge design and code (JSON/CSS variables).</li> <li><strong>Code Literacy:</strong> While you don’t need to write production code, you have a strong understanding of HTML, CSS/SASS, and modern Javascript fr ... (truncated, view full listing at source)