Design Systems and Product Architecture Design Lead
Amplitude is the leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. Over 3,800 customers, including Atlassian, NBCUniversal, Under Armour, Shopify, and Jersey Mike’s, rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. Amplitude guides companies every step of the way as they capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. When teams understand how people are using their products, they can deliver better product experiences that drive growth. Amplitude is the best-in-class analytics solution for product, data, and marketing teams, ranked #1 in multiple categories in G2’s Winter 2024 Report. Learn how to optimize your digital products and business at amplitude.com.
As an organization, we approach challenges with humility, take ownership of our contributions, and embrace a growth mindset that pushes us to constantly improve ourselves, each other, and the value we bring to customers and partners.
Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions. We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.
Design Systems and Product Architecture Design Lead
About the Role
Amplitude is looking for a Design Systems and Product Architecture Design Lead to redefine and drive the vision, strategy, and implementation of our design system across desktop and mobile. This is a unique opportunity to reestablish and evolve our design system with renewed alignment and commitment between design and engineering, ensuring a scalable, efficient, and high-quality user experience across our product suite.
As a key cross-functional partner, you will work closely with Product, Engineering, and Brand to build a cohesive UI component library, interaction patterns, and design guidelines. This role goes beyond maintaining a system—you will play a pivotal role in shaping the product platform approach for Amplitude’s core analytics products, working alongside engineering to ensure design and system architecture evolve together to meet business and user needs.
This is an exciting opportunity for a design leader who thrives in systems thinking, collaboration, and innovation, and who is passionate about rebuilding and scaling a design system from the ground up.
What You’ll Do
Redefine & Reestablish the Design System
- Lead the rebuilding of Amplitude’s design system, creating a unified, scalable framework that aligns design and engineering for seamless implementation.
- Establish Figma libraries, enabling teams to create consistent, reusable UI components that work cross-platform (Web, iOS, Android).
- Define design tokens, interaction patterns, and visual guidelines, ensuring consistency across Amplitude’s growing product suite.
- Continuously audit and refine our UI to identify inconsistencies, propose solutions, and push the visual design system forward.
Strengthen Design & Engineering Collaboration
- Partner deeply with engineering leadership to align design and system architecture, ensuring the design system integrates efficiently into front-end development workflows.
- Collaborate on building foundational product platform components that improve scalability, performance, and accessibility across Amplitude’s analytics products.
- Work closely with product teams to embed design system thinking into their workflows, enabling faster, more consistent product development.
- Advocate for best practices in componentization, ensuring UI components are robust, maintainable, and aligned with engineering standards.
Drive Accessibility & Inclusivity
- Develop accessible, inclusive UI components that adhere to WCAG standards, ensuring usability across a diverse range of users.
- Establish color, type, and iconographic systems that balance brand expression with functional clarity across different devices and contexts.
- Provide a framework for accessibility in both the design and development process, ensuring accessibility is a core part of Amplitude’s product experience.
Champion & Scale Design System Adoption
- Build a contribution model, enabling multiple product teams to contribute components while maintaining system integrity and governance.
- Evangelize the design system across Amplitude, educating teams on best practices, adoption strategies, and system evolution.
- Present the design system’s mission and roadmap to internal stakeholders, including designers, engineers, product managers, and leadership teams.
- Lead documentation efforts, ensuring the design system remains accessible, well-maintained, and easy to use for all teams.
Mentor & Lead
- Provide design leadership and guidance, helping teams apply shared patterns while identifying opportunities for new patterns and components.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement within the design and engineering teams.
- Inspire and mentor designers and engineers, guiding system adoption and design best practices across the organization.
What We’re Looking For
Experience & Expertise
- Proven experience leading design systems at scale, with a strong track record of rebuilding or evolving design systems in collaboration with engineering teams.
- Deep expertise in systems thinking, usability, and accessibility, ensuring design solutions are scalable and performant.
- Experience working across design and engineering, with an understanding of front-end frameworks, component libraries, and platform architecture.
- Highly skilled in Figma, with experience managing design libraries, tokens, and documentation.
- Ability to drive cross-functional collaboration, influencing design, engineering, and product teams to adopt systematized approaches.
- Strong UX and UI design skills, with experience designing for complex enterprise applications.
- A portfolio showcasing design systems work, including contributions to component libraries, interaction patterns, and scalable UI frameworks.
Bonus Skills
- Experience in front-end development, product management, or business analysis.
- Background in scalable design system governance, balancing flexibility and consistency across multiple autonomous teams.
- Passion for data-informed decision-making, incorporating user research and analytics into the design system evolution.
Why Amplitude?
This role is a unique opportunity to reestablish and redefine Amplitude’s design system in close partnership with engineering and product leadership. As the Design Systems and Product Architecture Design Lead, you’ll have a pivotal role in shaping the product platform for our core analytics products, ensuring a unified, scalable, and accessible experience across our ecosystem.
If you're excited about building, scaling, and evolving a design system that enables fast, efficient, and high-quality product development, we'd love to hear from you!What We’re Looking For:
- 8+ years of experience in some combination of cloud-native software development, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, and/or cloud infrastructure, with a more recent focus on Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem.
- Strong expertise in Kubernetes and related CNCF projects (e.g., Argo CD/Workflows, Backstage, Envoy, CoreDNS, and more) and in simplifying complex cloud infrastructure for broader teams.
- Operational experience at scale with technologies like Kafka and Airflow.
- Proficient in common infrastructure languages like Golang, Python, and Terraform, with experience developing and operating production systems.
- Extensive experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, networking, and security.
- Proven experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana Cloud, etc.) and a strong understanding of system performance tuning.
- Expertise in building abstractions over Kubernetes to simplify developer interaction with the platform.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across teams, build consensus, and drive initiatives in a high-pressure environment.
- High level of empathy and patience, with a commitment to mentoring and helping others succeed, and the ability to incorporate feedback and turn it into actionable improvements.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automation (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize, etc.), with a focus on reducing toil and operational overhead.
- A mindset focused on improving the developer experience and business alignment, with the flexibility to make decisions that may go against ideal technical preferences when necessary.
Who We Are
The Company: Amplitude is filled with humble, life-long learners who are eager to help one another and the company succeed. Our values of growth mindset, ownership, and humility are core to the way we work: we’re tenacious in the face of challenges, we take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared success, and we operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.
The Product: Amplitude is a digital analytics platform—we help companies capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. This empowers teams to build better product experiences that drive business growth. We’re super proud of what we’ve built and continue to expand: a platform that empowers companies to thrive in the digital era.
We care about the well-being of our team: We offer competitive pay and benefits packages that reflect our commitment to the health and well-being of our Ampliteers.
Some of our benefit programs include:
- Excellent medical, dental and vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee medical, dental, vision on select plans
- Flexible time off, paid holidays, and more
- Generous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (monthly), learning and development (quarterly), home office equipment (annual), and much more
- Excellent Parental benefits including: 12-20 weeks of Paid Parental Leave, Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support, Back-up Child Care support
- Mental health and wellness benefits including no cost employee access to Modern Health coaching & therapy Sessions and high quality physician office experience via One Medical membership (select U.S. locations only)
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
Other fun facts about Amplitude:
- We were recognized in the Newsweek Excellence Index 2024.
- Our customers love us! They've said we're the #1 product analytics solution for 15 quarters in a row on G2.
- We're focused on growth. Check us out in Deloitte’s 2023 Technology Fast 500™
- We care A LOT about product innovation. Fast Company called us the #3 most innovative enterprise company in the world.
- We invest in our people. We offer mentorship programs, management training, and wellness initiatives.
- We give back to our communities. We give every Ampliteer a charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.
- We were founded in 2012, went public via a direct listing in September 2021, and are now trading under the ticker $AMPL.
- We’re a global and fast-growing team! We have employees around the world and offices in San Francisco (HQ), New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.
- Our mascot is the datamonster, who loves to chow down on numbers, charts, and graphs. Nom nom.
Amplitude provides equal employment opportunities (EEO). All applicants are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation.
This role is eligible for equity, benefits and other forms of compensation.
Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in San Francisco Bay Area of California. Salary range: $185,000 - $333,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) plus equity.
Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude outside of the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Salary range: $166,000 - $298,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) plus equity.
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By applying for this job, you acknowledge that Amplitude processes your personal data in accordance with the Amplitude Applicant Privacy Notice.
Staying Safe - Protect Yourself From Recruitment Fraud
We are aware of individuals and entities fraudulently representing themselves as Amplitude recruiters and/or hiring managers. Amplitude will never ask for financial information or payment, or for personal information such as bank account number or social security number during the job application or interview process. Any emails from the Amplitude recruiting team will come from an @amplitude.com email address. You can learn more about how to protect yourself from these types of fraud by referring to this article. Please exercise caution and cease communications if something feels suspicious about your interactions.
Amplitude is a leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. More than 3,500 customers, including Atlassian, Jersey Mike’s, NBCUniversal, Shopify, and Under Armour, rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. Amplitude guides companies every step of the way as they capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. When teams understand how people are using their products, they can deliver better product experiences that drive growth.
As an organization, we approach challenges with humility, take ownership of our contributions, and embrace a growth mindset that pushes us to constantly improve ourselves, each other, and the value we bring to customers and partners.
Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions. We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.
By applying for this job, you acknowledge that Amplitude processes your personal data in accordance with the Amplitude Applicant Privacy Notice.
Staying Safe - Protect Yourself From Recruitment Fraud
We are aware of individuals and entities fraudulently representing themselves as Amplitude recruiters and/or hiring managers. Amplitude will never ask for financial information or payment, or for personal information such as bank account number or social security number during the job application or interview process. Any emails from the Amplitude recruiting team will come from an @amplitude.com email address. You can learn more about how to protect yourself from these types of fraud by referring to this article. Please exercise caution and cease communications if something feels suspicious about your interactions.
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