The Team 

Upstart’s Design Platform team is building the AI-native foundation for how we design and build products across the company. We own the design system, the platform strategy across web and native mobile, and the AI-enabled tools and standards that connect design to code. Our goal is to help every designer and engineer ship high-quality work faster. We sit within Product Design and work closely with frontend platform engineering to turn these ideas into systems teams use in production every day.

As Senior Manager on the Design Platform team, you will lead two senior designers and spend most of your time building alongside them: roughly 60% hands-on design and 40% people management. This is a role for someone who wants to stay close to the craft rather than step away from it. You will set the direction for Upstart's design system, shaping its component architecture, token strategy, and visual language. From there, you will decide how our products come together across web and native mobile, and build the AI-enabled workflows that change how designers and engineers work day to day. The result is a foundation every team at Upstart builds on to move from idea to production in the AI era.

How you’ll make an impact

• Shape the next generation of Upstart’s design system, defining the component architecture, token strategy, and visual language that guide how products are built across the company.
• Define our platform strategy across web and mobile app, deciding what should be shared and where each experience should feel distinct.
• Explore what AI-enabled design systems can become, turning emerging capabilities into new workflows, machine-readable standards, and tools that change how teams build.
• Define how we measure impact, using data to guide priorities and build leadership support.
• Establish the operating model for the Design Platform, creating clear ownership, governance, and contribution models across platform and product teams.
• Develop two senior designers as leaders and builders, giving them the context, feedback, and space to take on ambitious platform work.
• Partner with engineering and product design leaders to rethink how products get built, making the Design Platform the foundation teams use to move from idea to production

Minimum Qualifications 

• 8+ years of product design experience, including 2+ years of direct people management experience.
• Experience building or substantially scaling a design system adopted across multiple product teams.
• Experience defining design patterns or platform strategy across both web and native mobile experiences.
• Experience owning design systems work across components, tokens, documentation, governance, and visual design direction.
• Experience partnering directly with engineering on design system implementation, including component APIs and token architecture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to prototype or contribute to component implementation.
• Experience with AI-assisted design, prototyping, build tooling, or design-to-code workflows.
• Knowledge of multi-platform theming and native mobile design systems across iOS and Android.
• Analytical skills to use data to measure impact, identify insights, and inform decisions.
• Business judgment to set priorities, make tradeoffs, and build leadership support.
• Experience developing senior individual contributors and facilitating design critique.

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote 

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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