Staff Product Designer - Shopping Experiences

Overview

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone, finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We're a four-sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumers, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.We're hiring a Staff Product Designer to elevate the end-to-end experience across Instacart's Core Shopping ecosystem, the surfaces millions of customers use every day to browse, search, discover, fill their cart, and check out.

This role exists to bridge product design and the design language system, ensuring new ideas evolve and strengthen the living, breathing system rather than fragment it. It places a strong emphasis on visual craft and design language. Key accountabilities include defining and evolving how Instacart's shopping experiences look and feel, shaping a cohesive, high-quality design language through real product work. This includes setting direction and application of new and existing UI patterns, component design, hierarchy, motion, and overall interaction quality across surfaces.

You will primarily operate as a flex designer embedded within Core Shopping work tracks, elevating craft, refining interaction patterns, and ensuring system integrity across browse, search, item detail, cart, and checkout, while stepping in to lead high-impact projects end to end when needed.

About the Job

• Embed within Core Shopping workstreams including browse, search, item detail, cart, and checkout to elevate visual and interaction quality, stewarding patterns that improve clarity, trust, and speed for customers at every step of their journey.
• Act as a bridge between product teams and the design language system, ensuring new components and patterns are thoughtfully explored, validated, and integrated back into the system without fragmentation.
• Partner with product designers to explore and develop new interaction patterns, modules, and components before scaling them across the system, from real-time availability states to substitution logic to transactional confidence signals.
• Evolve the design language through product work, shaping components, patterns, and interaction models that scale across surfaces and teams.
• Define and refine UI components, layouts, and patterns with a high level of craft, ensuring clarity, hierarchy, and consistency across complex, high-density catalog environments.
• Set a high bar for visual quality and interaction design, influencing how interfaces look, feel, and behave across the product, with special attention to how customers perceive trust and ease in transactional moments.
• Drive cohesion, continuity, and consistency across end-to-end journeys, ensuring experiences feel connected and intuitive from first browse to final checkout.
• Accelerate the team with reusable flows, templates, and code-adjacent prototypes; partner with engineers to ensure feasible, accessible, and performant implementations.
• Lead high-impact initiatives end to end when needed, from problem framing and exploration through interactive prototyping, delivery, and launch, driving alignment with PM, engineering, data science, and brand partners.
• Introduce and evolve new ways of working across design, product, and engineering, using shared artifacts to improve clarity, speed, and alignment.
• Apply modern AI tools in daily workflows and within our internal Design Lab to explore motion, image generation, and code-driven prototypes that unlock new, scalable patterns.

What Success Looks Like

• Experiences feel cohesive, consistent, and connected to a clear and differentiated design language.
• The design language evolves through product work, with new components and patterns integrated without fragmentation.
• Product teams move faster and produce higher quality work through your support.
• You raise the bar for visual craft and interaction quality across teams.
• You act as an accelerant, improving both speed and clarity of execution.
• The work you contribute to drives measurable impact on adoption, engagement, and retention.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years designing consumer-facing digital products across web and mobile, with a portfolio demonstrating complex, multi-step transactional journeys and system-level thinking across high-density catalog surfaces.
• Deep experience in systems thinking with experience working on or closely with design language systems or foundations teams, with the ability to translate system principles into real product experiences.
• Exceptional visual design and UI craft, with a strong sense of taste and attention to detail, and experience defining or evolving design language systems in high quality consumer products.
• Experience working in an agency or client-facing environment, with a proven ability to navigate multiple stakeholders, translate briefs into high-quality design work, and deliver under real-world constraints.
• Strong point of view on visual systems, interaction patterns, and how design language creates differentiation and emotional resonance.
• Experience operating as a bridge across product and systems, helping teams explore new ideas while maintaining cohesion and scalability.
• Proven track record of navigating ambiguity and influencing across multi-team environments, connecting fragmented efforts into cohesive strategies and outcomes.
• Comfortable embedding within product teams while maintaining accountability to broader system integrity.
• Experience using interactive, end to end experiences, not just static designs, as a primary tool for storytelling, alignment, and decision making.
• Strong communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence direction and align cross functional teams.
• Fluent in Figma and Google Slides, using them to communicate ideas clearly and drive alignment.
• Base knowledge of emerging AI tools with a strong interest and comfort experimenting with new methods on a daily basis. The team is primarily leveraging Claude with an active Design Lab that experiments with additional tools ranging from motion design, image creation and code driven design prototypes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for e-commerce, grocery, or marketplace products where item discovery, real-time availability, and transactional confidence are central to the customer experience.
• Familiarity with domains such as meal planning, nutrition, health goals, and personalization, and how they intersect with household grocery behavior.
• Experience designing high-visibility, content-rich surfaces such as search results, browse grids, and item detail pages, with a strong point of view on hierarchy, density, and visual clarity at scale.
• Experience working within and evolving large scale design systems, ensuring new components and patterns align to system principles while elevating overall craft and cohesion.
• Comfort operating across distributed, cross functional teams, influencing multi-team initiatives and connecting work into cohesive, system-level outcomes without direct authority.

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