About the RoleWe're looking for a Principal Designer to set the look, feel and identity of DoorDash's merchant products. You'll own the visual direction for DashOS, the software restaurants use to run their business: agentic experiences, point-of-sale, handheld, tablet, mobile and web. These products already work. Your job is to make merchants love using them and to give them a recognizable identity across every surface, including hardware where no design convention exists.
Visual craft is the center of this role. You'll use code and AI tools to ship that craft, prototyping in React and generating and refining UI with tools like Cursor and Claude, so your ideas reach production with full fidelity. You'll also define the visual foundation of the design system (tokens, components, guidance and examples) so that designers, engineers and AI tools all produce on-brand, high-quality UI. [Engineering partners build and maintain the tooling; you set the rules and the quality bar.]
You'll join the Merchant design team and report to the Senior Director, Product Design for Merchant. This role is hybrid, with 1-2 days a week in a Design Hub.
You're excited about this opportunity because you will...- Set the visual direction for merchant products across DashOS and bring multiple teams around a shared vision, so the work compounds instead of duplicating.
- Ship high-craft interfaces with a clear point of view, turning complex, data-dense workflows into screens merchants can read at a glance in a busy kitchen or at the counter.
- Own the visual foundation of the design system: define the tokens, components, usage rules and examples that both people and AI tools apply. Review generated UI against that bar, record what good looks like, and improve the system based on how teams actually use it.
- Design for new surfaces. Create visual systems for points-of-sale, handhelds and agentic experiences where no existing paradigm applies.
- Influence through the work. Earn trust with prototypes and shipped products instead of decks, and keep your prototypes production-ready.
- Raise the bar across the team. Mentor senior designers, help close strong hires, and help people sharpen their sense of what to build and why.
We're excited about you because...- You've designed interfaces that defined or reshaped a product's look and feel, and your portfolio shows top-of-bar visual craft with range across brands and styles.
- You can build what you design. You work in React, TypeScript or similar, and use AI tools to explore directions and refine UI faster than you could by hand.
- You've set direction across a product area, and people adopted your work because it was good, not because you told them to.
- You'd rather build a visual system that makes 20 designers faster and more consistent than ship one great screen yourself.
- You've worked on complex, information-dense products such as point-of-sale, fintech, marketplaces or platform teams, and you've shipped with product and engineering partners, including pushing back constructively.
- Bonus: you've designed for devices or contexts with no existing design paradigm and built the visual system from scratch.
CompensationThe successful candidate's starting pay will fall within the pay range listed below and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. Base salary is localized according to an employee's work location. Ranges are market-dependent and may be modified in the future.
In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.
DoorDash cares about you and your overall well-being. That's why we offer a comprehensive benefits package to all regular employees, which includes a 401(k) plan with employer matching, 16 weeks of paid parental leave, wellness benefits, commuter benefits match, paid time off and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable laws (e.g. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act). DoorDash also offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and a mental health program, among others.
To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here.
See below for paid time off details:
- For salaried roles: flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
- For hourly roles: vacation accrued at about 1 hour for every 25.97 hours worked (e.g. about 6.7 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 3.4 hours/month if working 20 hours/week), and paid sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 30 hours worked (e.g. about 5.8 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 2.9 hours/month if working 20 hours/week).
The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.
$208,800-$307,000 USD
