Product Designer, AI Design Systems

Cherry | Individual Contributor, Founding Design Systems Hire
About the Role

We9re looking for the founding member of Cherry9s design systems team: someone who takes this system, still young, and turns it into the backbone of how Cherry builds. This isn9t a caretaker role. It9s a chance to define, from the ground up, what a design system looks like when AI is a first-class collaborator rather than an afterthought, and to lead that vision as the team grows around it.

This role is the foundation of Cherry9s quality at scale. When the system is right, good decisions aren9t made by individuals: they9re encoded, and reinforced automatically by the tools everyone already uses to design and build. Get this right, and every team at Cherry moves faster with less risk. That9s the bar this role is held to, not 4good enough,4 but the standard every other decision gets measured against.

Cherry9s design system spans our provider web application, consumer web application, provider mobile application, consumer mobile application, and point-of-sale system. You9ll own the component library, the React codebase, interaction patterns, tokens, and documentation, end to end. Cherry is fully committed to AI-native workflows: everyone here designs and builds with Claude, and we have a dedicated AI Enablement team pushing that further. We9re moving away from traditional Figma-first workflows toward tooling built for the AI era, and this role will lead that transition, not just adapt to it.

You won9t be maintaining a library. You9ll be building, and leading, the next version of it, with real say in the team that grows around this work.
What You9ll Do

Founding Member

• Serve as a founding member of Cherry9s design systems team, with real say in how it9s structured, staffed, and led as it grows
• Guide the team through the shift to AI-native workflows, and influence how Cherry adopts new tools and practices as they emerge

Own the System

• Own the design system end to end: the component library, tokens, and documentation
• Own the design direction of the system, along with component architecture, implementation, and outcomes in code
• Improve the system across teams: identify structural issues, align approaches, and evolve patterns for scale rather than just maintaining what exists

Lead on Design

• Influence interaction and visual design for the design system, guiding decisions across teams rather than owning a single surface
• Influence Cherry9s design language, evolving it rather than just documenting what9s already there

Build for Claude First

• Build a Claude-first, modern AI design system: one where Claude and other AI agents produce on-system output by default
• Help determine what Cherry9s design toolset looks like next, rather than defaulting to whatever we use today

Collaborate

• Work closely with your front-end engineering partner in the USA on component architecture, implementation, and code review
• Improve how design and engineering communicate and execute together, identifying friction and adjusting process across initiatives

What You Bring

• 6-10 years of experience in product design
• Real, proven coding and technical skills, not just familiarity with code
• A track record of guiding visual and interaction decisions across teams: evolving patterns and addressing inconsistencies, not just applying what already exists
• Experience improving a design system across teams: identifying structural issues, aligning approaches, and building for scale
• A strong point of view on design tooling: you9ll help determine what Cherry9s toolset looks like next, not just execute in Figma or Pencil because that9s what we use today
• Ability to communicate fluently with designers, engineers, and product leaders, and to align multiple teams around a shared design direction
• The instinct to lead: you9ve either run a small team or function before, or you9re ready to be the first person doing so

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Claude, including Claude Code: you9ve authored the skills and rules that encode design decisions into how it works, so it produces on-system output by default
• Comfortable writing and shipping production code: you don9t need to be a React specialist, we already have a strong foundation for code quality
• Strong understanding of front-end testing practices and code hygiene
• Experience collaborating with distributed teams

You9re Probably a Great Fit If...

• You want to be the person who defines what design systems become in the AI era, not someone who waits to be told
• You believe design systems are the actual source of a company9s scalability and efficiency: not a style guide, not a Storybook, but the infrastructure that determines how fast and how well a company builds
• You want to found something. This is a team of one today, and you9ll have real say in what it becomes
• You get frustrated when good design decisions aren9t encoded somewhere they can scale, and you do something about it