Employer: GitHub
GitHub is looking for an experienced Design Infrastructure Director to lead the teams working on our design system Primer, and core UI experiences for GitHub.com. This team is part of the Design organization and works closely with engineering, product, and marketing teams.
Your direct reports will be managers for the Primer Design, Primer Engineering, and Platform UX Design teams. You’ll work together with your managers, engineering and product partners to develop roadmaps, prioritize staffing, and provide direction through near and long term initiatives. Primer is an open-source design system with multiple parts including Rails, React, and CSS libraries, design tokens, and an icon system. Increasingly Primer will need to support more of GitHub’s ecosystem such as native mobile apps, CLI, illustration, and email. The Platform Design team works on cross-cutting experiences of github.com, such as the Command Palette, navigation, and landing pages.
What we’re looking for:
Leaders in the Design org often have IC experience in the same field as the people they will be leading. Our leaders are people managers, and provide design direction. For this specific role we’re looking for someone who values the following:
- Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context to the larger system of the product, as well as ensuring we support experiences for individual features.
- Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our design system should reflect that, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Designing for inclusivity first, can lead us to solving problems for the many, and open up our product for more people.
- Creating together: Getting to the right result is our focus, this can come from systems designers or product designers, and ideally both. Facilitating collaboration between teams and individuals is key so that we continue to evolve the design system alongside the needs of the product.
- Progress and impact: Our team often works on the meta and so it’s easy to get caught up in the design details. We have to be mindful of this and ensure we keep making decisions and move forward. This means being solutions oriented and prioritizing progress over correctness when it’s the right call.
- Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between peers and leadership. It can take time and effort to get there but it’s worth it. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes, will yield better results when we can get to the real talk .
Responsibilities
- Lead a cross functional org of 26+ including systems designers, engineers, product designers, and people managers.
- Help to set your team up for success and enable them to do their best work.
- Own overall vision and direction for the Primer design system.
- Work with Design, Product, Engineering, and Marketing leadership to develop the strategy and roadmap across the product and marketing initiatives.
- Facilitate hiring as well as mentorship and career development.
- Build impactful relationships across the product, engineering, and other cross-functional partners you’re working with.
- Bring operational knowledge and workflow excellence to managing the team including resource decisions.
- Drive the business value of design systems and platform user experience by measuring and reporting outcomes for the full organization.
- Exceptional communication at every level of the business, influencing executives and inspiring team members.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of design/creative experience, 2+ years of design systems experience.
- Deep experience in platform / device design patterns and templates, design thinking, product design, technology enterprise project or program management, service design or design strategy.
- You are confident in writing HTML & CSS and are comfortable using github.com and Git version control.
- Experience partnering with Product and Engineering teams to launch cohesive experiences across multiple platforms.
- Technical understanding of capabilities and limitations for web platforms.
- Track record of advocacy of accessibility requirements and delivery.
- You are organized and are comfortable overseeing multiple design projects, ensuring that your team can stay focused on creating great experiences.
- You know how to apply just enough process, keeping the team nimble and successful in a culture that values moving fast and iterating quickly.
- You can find the highest impact opportunities and iterate on them quickly while things are in motion.
Bonus qualifications:
- Experience building a design systems team from scratch.
- You have a technical background or experience working on developer tools.
- Experience designing cross-platform experiences including native mobile (iOS and Android).
Who We Are:
GitHub is the developer company. We make it easier for developers to be developers: to work together, to solve challenging problems, and to create the world’s most important technologies. We foster a collaborative community that can come together as individuals and in teams to create the future of software and make a difference in the world.
Leadership Principles:
Customer Obsessed – Trust by Default – Ship to Learn – Own the Outcome – Growth Mindset – Global Product, Global Team – Anything is Possible – Practice Kindness
Why You Should Join:
At GitHub, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hubbers) to do the best work of their lives. We’ve designed one of the coolest workspaces in San Francisco (HQ), where many Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The rest of our Hubbers work remotely around the globe. Check out an updated list of where we can hire here: https://github.com/about/careers/remote
We are also committed to keeping Hubbers healthy, motivated, focused and creative. We’ve designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we’ve built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.
GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don’t discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there’s any way we can make the interview process better for you; we’re happy to accommodate!
Please note that benefits vary by country. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask your Talent Partner.
