Senior Product Designer (Design Systems)

Role Overview

Senior Product Designer (Design Systems) at Careem, based in the greater Middle East region, serving Careem's Everything App platform. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role.

Company Overview

Careem is building the Everything App for the greater Middle East, enabling movement, food and grocery ordering, payments, and more. Since 2012, Careem has enabled earnings for over 2.5 million Captains, simplified the lives of more than 70 million customers, and operates in 70+ cities across 10 countries, from Morocco to Pakistan. The organization is entering a new chapter powered by AI, seeking talent to apply AI to build tools, automate workflows, and create real impact.

Role Purpose

Own the evolution of Careem's design system, which underpins every product experience across the super app including rides, food, groceries, payments and beyond. Govern the token architecture, component library and documentation that keep a multi-vertical platform coherent, while using AI to make the system faster to maintain, easier to adopt and smarter to build with. Lead the design system through its next chapter, where it serves not only designers and engineers, but AI agents that consume, generate and assemble design.

Key Responsibilities

Design System Ownership

• Own the lifecycle of design system tokens, components, and patterns from inception through shipping, iteration, and deprecation.
• Define and enforce standards for color, type, spacing, and interaction across platforms (iOS, Android, web) and locales, including RTL and Arabic.
• Resolve ambiguity regarding organizational ownership and responsibilities by maintaining a clear, intentional token architecture.
• Establish and maintain comprehensive documentation addressing identified needs for detailing appropriate guidance to ensure cross-component consistency.
• Champion accessibility (WCAG) as a system-level guarantee and manage the backlog with product and engineering partners.

AI Integration

• Structure tokens and components so agentic design-to-code and prompt-to-design workflows produce on-system output.
• Build and maintain Code Connect mappings, MCP integrations, and structured component metadata.
• Implement AI-assisted audits and linting to catch off-system usage and token misuse before they ship.
• Use AI to keep documentation verified and versioned alongside the components it describes.
• Prototype Figma plugins and agent workflows to remove repetitive tasks for the wider design team.

Adoption and Enablement

• Articulate the system's value in efficiency and quality to stakeholders ranging from individual contributors to executives.
• Facilitate design system guilds and critiques, and synthesize cross-vertical feedback into prioritized improvements.
• Raise the organization's AI proficiency through workshops and training material.

Partnership and Influence

• Work closely with engineering to translate design patterns into deployable components, ensuring technical feasibility.
• Apply judgment to manage component bloat, maintaining separate architectures when merging variants creates excessive technical complexity.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to align on design system goals and product strategy.

Qualifications & Experience

• 5+ years experience in product design, with at least 3 years dedicated to design systems at scale, ideally in multi-brand or super-app environments.
• Demonstrated experience building real workflows with LLMs and agentic tools, such as Figma Plugin API, MCP-based integrations, or prompt design.
• Experience with RTL and Arabic-first products or the Middle East market is a bonus.
• Experience with production design-to-code pipelines, such as Code Connect and token transformation, is a bonus.
• Active participation in the AI × design community through open-source contributions, speaking, or writing is a bonus.

Skills & Competencies

• Advanced knowledge of variables, token architecture, component APIs, library management, and branching.
• Ability to prototype in JavaScript and TypeScript, JSON, and manage design token pipelines.
• Ability to distinguish semantic intent from value coincidence and manage complexity through unification.
• Excellent English writing and presentation skills.

Additional Information

• Work remotely from any country in the world for 30 days a year.
• Unlimited vacation days per year.
• Access to healthcare benefits and fitness reimbursements for health activities including gym, health club, and training classes.
• Opportunity to work and learn from inspiring colleagues in a purposeful organisation dedicated to creating impact in the region.
• Opportunity to explore new learning and growth opportunities every day.