Staff Product Designer, Design Systems
Job Description
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.
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 Staff Product Designer to join our team at a critical juncture to evolve our operational frameworks, mature our visual language, and champion a unified experience across our consumer and merchant products.
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.
What You’ll Do
- Strategic Architecture: 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.
- Visual Evolution: 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.
- Cross-Platform Parity: 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."
- Operational Excellence: Collaborate, author and maintain detailed documentation and usage guidelines. You will help grow the "source of truth" that reduces friction for product teams.
- Collaboration & Bridge Building: 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.
- Evangelism & Education: 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.
- Metrics & Analysis: 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.
- Accessibility Leadership: Champion inclusive design standards (WCAG 2.1 AA+), ensuring that accessibility is baked into the core of our components, not treated as an afterthought.
What We Look For
Systems Mastery & Technical Fluency
- Advanced Figma Expertise: 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.
- Design Token Strategy: Experience architecting semantic naming conventions and token taxonomies that bridge design and code (JSON/CSS variables).
- Code Literacy: While you don’t need to write production code, you have a strong understanding of HTML, CSS/SASS, and modern Javascript frameworks (React, React Native). You can speak the same language as front-end engineers.
- Native Mobile Knowledge: Strong familiarity with Human Interface Guidelines (Apple) and Material Design (Google), and how to balance native patterns with custom branding.
Leadership & Strategy
- Experience at Scale: 8+ years of product design experience with significant time dedicated specifically to Design Systems at a large-scale technology company.
- Governance Models: Experience establishing contribution models (how other teams add to the system) and governance workflows (how we decide what gets added).
- Visual Craft: Exceptional visual design and information architecture skills. You have an obsessive eye for typography, spacing, color theory, and micro-interactions.
- Accessibility: Deep knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and assistive technologies.
- Ambiguity & Autonomy: You are able to self-direct, prioritize, and clearly communicate with stakeholders in shifting environments.
- Humility & Mentorship: You recognize the efforts of all contributors and are eager to elevate the team around you through critique and mentorship.
Nice to Haves
- Experience with documentation platforms (e.g., Storybook, Zeroheight, Supernova).
- Experience in Fintech, Consumer Finance, or regulated industries.
- Experience with motion design and defining animation choreography for systems (Lottie, Rive).
- Experience writing automation scripts or plugins for Figma.
Base Pay Grade - N
Equity Grade - 12
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
CAN base pay range per year: $150,000 - $200,000
#LI-Remote
Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.
We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:
- Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
- Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
- Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
- ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount
We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.
[For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.
