What's the role?

Design craft and systems thinking are how Etsy expresses quality, coherence, and personality across every product surface. As a Design Manager on Etsy's Studio team, you will lead a small team of visual and systems designers doing high-impact, cross-cutting work that shapes how experiences come together across the entire product. You set the craft bar, build a strong team, and remove the friction that keeps great design from happening.

In this role, you'll grow and manage a team of Visual and Systems Designers who build frameworks, patterns, and tools that define how design functions at a platform level — from interaction systems and agentic experience patterns to design sprints that set strategic direction across buyer and seller surfaces. You will partner closely with Brand, Product Design leadership, Design Systems, and Engineering to ensure your team's output is expressive, scalable, and unmistakably Etsy. You bring a systems mentality and strong visual craft sensibility to your management practice — you know what great looks like and you coach your team toward it. Your team's work impacts every part of our ecosystem, including web, Android, and iOS.

This is a full-time position reporting to the Director of Product Design for UX Platform. The Studio team sits within UX Platform, partnering across product and brand to elevate craft and create shared systems that accelerate high-quality experiences. We collaborate with Design Systems to build scalable frameworks and with Brand to bring our expressive language into product. We are a collaborative, curious, and craft-driven group that values rigor and partnership. If you enjoy building teams that work directly with the people who need them and setting a higher standard for design across an entire ecosystem, you will thrive here.

What's this team like at Etsy?

The Studio team is collaborative, craft-driven, and curious. We form tight, time-bound partnerships with product squads rather than owning surfaces permanently—which means our work has to be rigorous enough to stick after we leave. We deliver visual systems that are optimized for reusability: frameworks, pattern libraries, and playbooks that teams can build on. We connect dots across the org to prevent fragmented, one-off solutions from calcifying into legacy. If you thrive on variety, love shaping ambiguous problems into clear systems, and want your team's work to influence every buyer and seller on the platform, you'll feel at home here.

What does the day-to-day look like?

• Manage and grow a team of design specialists. Lead regular 1:1s, give clear and actionable feedback on craft and process, and support each designer's growth through coaching, sponsorship, and stretch assignments. Help your team do the best work of their careers.

• Set and hold the craft bar. Know what excellent systems-level design looks like – and make sure your team gets there. Review work with a sharp eye for interaction quality, visual precision, and pattern scalability. Model the standards you expect.

• Drive cross-cutting Studio engagements. Partner with your team to own end-to-end Studio work: from problem framing and discovery through frameworks, guidelines, and production-ready specs. Engage models range from short embedded sprints to multi-month platform partnerships – you help your team navigate all of them.

• Champion systems thinking. Ensure your team builds for reuse and scale, not just the immediate ask. Coach designers to diagnose root causes, not symptoms, and to build solutions designed to outlast their involvement.

• Advocate for agentic prototyping practices. Support your team in using modern AI-assisted prototyping workflows — tools like Cursor, Claude, and our proprietary prototyping environment — to build high-fidelity, functional prototypes that go beyond static mocks. Model and encourage a bias toward motion over statics.

• Represent Studio in cross-functional partnerships. Be the design leadership voice in conversations with Brand, Design Systems, Engineering, and Product. Ensure your team's work is well-positioned, understood, and adopted.

• Evolve how Studio operates. Own and improve the team's intake process, engagement model, documentation practices, and ways of working. Build the operational infrastructure that lets strong IC work happen consistently.

• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law

Qualities that will help you thrive in this role:

• A portfolio or body of work demonstrating depth in visual systems, interaction design, or design systems – you have a clear point of view on what craft excellence looks like.
• Experience managing Product Designers, including giving substantive craft feedback, supporting career growth, and navigating performance conversations.
• Fluency with agentic prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude, or equivalent) and a genuine interest in building a team culture that defaults to prototyping in motion rather than statics.
• Experience shipping design work across multiple platforms (web, iOS, Android), with an understanding of how constraints differ and where coherence matters.
• The ability to operate in ambiguity: you can frame a poorly-defined problem, align collaborators on a direction, and help your team implement without a clear brief.
• Strong communication and collaborator management; you can represent your team's work to design and product leadership, and create space for your designers to do the same.
• A track record of deep collaboration with product, engineering, brand, and research — and of building those relationships for your team, not just yourself.

• Hire, manage, and develop a team of Product Designers working on cross-cutting systems and craft initiatives.
• Set a clear and consistent quality bar for interaction, visual design, and systems thinking across all Studio engagements.
• Oversee the delivery of high-impact Studio work from framing through production-ready output.
• Partner with cross-functional leadership — product, engineering, brand, and research — to position Studio as a strategic design partner.
• Drive team health, culture, and operational practices that enable consistent, high-quality output.
• Contribute to UX Foundations leadership discussions on team strategy, resourcing, and organizational direction.
  

Compensation & Benefits

In addition to salary, you'll be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our that support you and your family. Base salary is determined by your location, skills, and experience.

Etsy uses two geographic pay zones to reflect the labor markets where we compete for talent: one called Geo-1, covering the New York City metropolitan area, San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle metropolitan area, and one called Geo-2, covering all other U.S. locations. Salary ranges for this role vary by zone and are listed below.

Location

We prioritize candidates based within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn Office. Depending on proximity, we ask team members to come in once or twice per week. Remote candidates outside commutable distance may be considered on a case-by-case basis, with the expectation of occasional travel to the office. Learn more details about our work modes and workplace safety policies .

Salary Range:

What's Next

If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please share your resume with us and feel free to include a cover letter if you'd like. As we hope you've seen already, Etsy is a place that values individuality and variety. We don't want you to be like everyone else -- we want you to be like you! So tell us what you're all about.