Staff Product Designer - Shopping Experiences

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>We're transforming the grocery industry</strong></p> <p><span class="im">At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.</span></p> <p>Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.</p> <p><strong>Instacart is a Flex First team </strong></p> <p>There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. <a href="https://www.instacart.careers/flex-first" target="_blank" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://instacart.careers/remote/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1651869232122000&amp;usg=AOvVaw37OlxP8hAKN7nq4YwHQH7e">Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.</a></p></div><h2><strong>Overview</strong></h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.&nbsp;</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h2><strong>About the Job</strong></h2> <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Evolve the design language through product work, shaping components, patterns, and interaction models that scale across surfaces and teams.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Drive cohesion, continuity, and consistency across end-to-end journeys, ensuring experiences feel connected and intuitive from first browse to final checkout.</li> <li>Accelerate the team with reusable flows, templates, and code-adjacent prototypes; partner with engineers to ensure feasible, accessible, and performant implementations.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Introduce and evolve new ways of working across design, product, and engineering, using shared artifacts to improve clarity, speed, and alignment.</li> <li>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.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What Success Looks Like</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Experiences feel cohesive, consistent, and connected to a clear and differentiated design language.</li> <li>The design language evolves through product work, with new components and patterns integrated without fragmentation.</li> <li>Product teams move faster and produce higher quality work through your support.</li> <li>You raise the bar for visual craft and interaction quality across teams.</li> <li>You act as an accelerant, improving both speed and clarity of execution.</li> <li>The work you contribute to drives measurable impact on adoption, engagement, and retention.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>About You</strong></h2> <p><strong>Minimum Qualifications</strong></p> <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Experience working in an agency or client-