Senior UX Designer, Design System

About the position

At CarGurus (NASDAQ: CARG), our mission is to give people the power to reach their destination. We started as a small team of developers determined to bring trust and transparency to car shopping. Since then, our history of innovation and go-to-market acceleration has driven industry-leading growth. In fact, we’re the largest and fastest-growing automotive marketplace, and we’ve been profitable for over 15 years. The market is evolving, and we are too, moving the entire automotive journey online and guiding our customers through every step. That includes everything from the sale of an old car to the financing, purchase, and delivery of a new one. Today, tens of millions of consumers visit CarGurus.com each month, and ~30,000 dealerships use our products. CarGurus has a people-first culture that fosters kindness, collaboration, and innovation, and empowers our Gurus with tools to fuel their career growth. CarGurus is looking for a Senior User Experience Designer to lead the evolution of our design system to enable faster, more consistent product development across all products and platforms. Ultimately, you will empower our designers and engineers with a high-leverage single source of truth that multiplies output and streamlines the entire development lifecycle. You are the keeper of shared standards — the person who makes it easier for every designer and engineer to ship better work.

Responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and evolve components, patterns, and interaction standards that serve the full product surface.
• Partner closely with Engineering on system implementation, architecture decisions, and handoff processes.
• Proactively identify gaps by monitoring how the system is used across products, and close those gaps before they become workarounds.
• Reduce redundant design and development work by standardizing the most common solutions.
• Support design and engineering teams in adopting the system effectively, through documentation, reviews, and direct collaboration.
• Govern the contribution process: how changes get proposed, reviewed, and approved.
• Maintain a healthy system backlog and triage incoming requests with clear prioritization.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience: in UX/product design, with at least 4 years focused on design systems.
• Proven expertise: working with Figma variables and component architecture, including how they map to coded token structures.
• Working knowledge: of front-end fundamentals (HTML, CSS).
• Experience: dealing with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) and how they inform component design and documentation.
• Strong systems thinking: you naturally see patterns, spot inconsistencies, and design for reuse.
• Demonstrated experience: building and scaling a design system, ideally at a product company with multiple teams.
• Ability: to balance consistency with flexibility; you know when to standardize and when to leave room for product judgment.
• Comfort: working closely with Engineering, including familiarity with how design tokens, component libraries, and handoff tooling work in practice.
• AI-first mindset: by proactively integrating LLMs and automation into the design system workflow to reduce manual friction, while maintaining a critical eye for quality and system integrity.
• Clear communicator: and cross-team influencer — you can get alignment from designers, engineers, and PMs without authority.
• Detail-oriented: and reliable; teams depend on the system being accurate and well-documented.
• Comfortable: in a governance role: setting standards, running reviews, and saying no when the system integrity is at stake.

Nice-to-haves

• Hands-on experience with design token pipelines and tooling (e.g., Style Dictionary, Theo, or equivalent).
• Certification in IAAP/WAAS is a distinct advantage.
• Experience with component library tooling, including writing or reviewing component documentation at the code layer.
• Familiarity with version control (Git) and how design system changes move through a development workflow.

Benefits

• Best-in-class benefits and compensation
• Equity for all employees, both when they start and as they continue to grow with us
• Career development programs
• Corporate giving programs
• Employee resource groups (ERGs) and communities
• Flexible hybrid model
• Robust time off policies
• Daily free lunch
• New car discount
• Meditation and fitness apps
• Commuting cost coverage
• Discretionary bonuses/incentives
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)