Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

About This Role

Strava is the leading digital community for active people with more than 125 million athletes in more than 190 countries. The platform offers a holistic view of your active lifestyle, no matter where you live, which sport you love and/or what device you use. Everyone belongs on Strava when they are pursuing an active life.

Strava’s Design Team advocates for our community members and our business, setting and executing on the vision for our product to connect athletes to what motivates them and help them find their personal best. We use design, research, data, strategy and empathy to guide cross-functional teams toward our common goal of becoming the preeminent platform for athletes. It is important to us to include diverse perspectives, and empower our teams to do great work.

As a Staff Product Designer on the Design Systems Team, you will lead multiple significant projects focused on evolving, maintaining, and enhancing our design systems. Your role will be crucial in advancing Strava's comprehensive design system. Your work will enable design and product teams to create high-quality, consistent experiences more efficiently. You will drive improvements in accessibility and information architecture for both mobile and web platforms, and contribute to the modernization of our products and user experiences.

We are looking for a passionate candidate with strong systems thinking and expertise in visual design and user experience. This role requires experience in building design systems from ground up, leveraging Figma libraries, dev mode, tokens, and introducing prototyping tools. You will be responsible for evolving the UX and UI patterns for both mobile and web platforms. Additionally, you will create and maintain documentation, usage principles, and guidelines for components and patterns. You will also contribute to modernizing our product through the design system. Experience in data visualization and data storytelling is a plus.

You’ll work closely with teams to identify user needs and problems, and define optimized end-to-end user journeys. You’ll collaborate closely with the design, product, data and engineering teams to deliver the best-in-class experience for Strava’s users.

This role is based in our San Francisco, CA or Denver, CO office with a hybrid in-office work requirement of at least 3 days per week.

For more information on compensation and benefits, please click here.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will:

• Up-level our design system, with attention to UX patterns, visual polish, motion and animation


• Design and maintain the Figma libraries, components, tokens, UX and UI patterns, and documentation for Strava’s design system.


• Lead initiatives that enhance the information architecture and data storytelling for our experiences.


• Write documentation and usage principles and guidelines that guide designers and engineers how to use components and patterns across design and code.


• Lead initiatives to enhance and upgrade accessibility standards for our product


• Identify and contribute to opportunities for enhancing and modernizing the product.


• Lead and execute across all phases of the design process from vision to implementation


• Lead projects and collaborate effectively with designers and cross-functional (XFN) partners while proactively advancing tasks. This role involves working with multiple teams to complete projects and reviewing the work of other designers to ensure compliance with system standards


• Have direct and easily attributable impact on our business growth


• Demonstrate strong understanding & implementation of internal design process


• Partner with research team, and use research techniques, competitive analysis and data to inform strategic and tactical design decisions


• Collaborate with partners in product, engineering, marketing and analytics to help identify problems and opportunities and help shape strategic vision


• Mentor designers and raise the quality bar across design and product

You will be successful here by:

• Embracing an inclusive, collaborative environment that elevates a diverse set of voices and experiences.


• Applying a systems thinking approach to problem solving


• Clearly and simply articulating your design decisions and connecting your design decisions back to team goals and objectives


• Guiding the vision for the product and achieving it through design explorations, documentation, and presentations


• Participating in qualitative research and quantitative analysis


• Producing detailed specs for your interaction models and UI and collaborating with engineers

We’re excited about you because you have:

• Minimum of 7 years of experience designing and building design systems


• A portfolio that showcases what you’ve shipped and the impact it had specific to the design systems


• Designed and shipped experiences for both web and native mobile apps


• Combination of technical knowledge and visual design skills which allows you to create intuitive and well-crafted product design solutions


• Demonstrated the power of design to drive business impact


• Passion for testing ideas, taking smart risks and learning from them


• Experience working in an Agile software organization, in cross-functional teams / pods / vertical teams

About Strava

Strava is Swedish for “strive,” which epitomizes who we are and what we do. We’re a passionate and committed team, unified by our mission to connect athletes to what motivates them and help them find their personal best. With billions of activity uploads from all over the world, we have a humbling and adventurous vision: to be the record of the world’s athletic activities and the technology that makes every effort count.

Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. Just as we’re deeply committed to unlocking their potential, we’re dedicated to providing a world-class, inclusive workplace where our employees can grow and thrive, too. We’re backed by Sequoia Capital, TCV, Madrone Partners and Jackson Square Ventures, and we’re expanding in order to exceed the needs of our growing community of global athletes. Our culture reflects our community. We are continuously striving to hire and engage diverse teammates from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives because we know we are a stronger team together.

Despite challenges in the world around us, we are continuing to grow camaraderie and positivity within our culture, and we are unified in our commitment to becoming an antiracist company. We are differentiated by our truly people-first approach, our compassionate leadership, and our belief that we can bring joy and inspiration to athletes’ lives — now more than ever. All to say, it’s a great time to join Strava!

Strava is an equal opportunity employer. In keeping with the values of Strava, we make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

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