About The Role: 

Careem’s design system underpins every product experience across the super app, including rides, food, groceries, payments and beyond. We’re looking for a Design System Lead to own its evolution through its next chapter: one where the system serves not only designers and engineers, but AI agents that consume, generate and assemble design.This is a hands-on senior IC role for someone who is both a rigorous systems designer and a capable AI tool-builder. You’ll govern the token architecture, component library and documentation that keep a multi-vertical platform coherent, and you’ll use AI to make the system faster to maintain, easier to adopt and smarter to build with. 

What You’ll Do

Own the Design System

• Own the lifecycle of Design System’s 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/Arabic.
• Resolve ambiguity regarding organizational ownership and responsibilities by maintaining a clear, intentional token architecture.
• Establish and maintain comprehensive documentation, specifically 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.

Make the System AI-native

• 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.

Drive Adoption and Enablement

•  Articulate the system’s value in efficiency and quality to stakeholders ranging from ICs 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.

Partner and Influence

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

What You'll Need:

• 5+ years experience in product design, with at least 3 years dedicated to design systems at scale (ideally, multi-brand or super-app environments).
• Advanced knowledge of variables, token architecture, component APIs, library management, and branching.
• Demonstrated experience building real workflows with LLMs and agentic tools (e.g., Figma Plugin API, MCP-based integrations, or prompt design).
• Ability to prototype in JavaScript/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.

Bonus Points

• Experience with RTL/Arabic-first products or the Middle East market.
• Experience with production design-to-code pipelines (Code Connect, token transformation).
• Active participation in the AI × design community (open-source contributions, speaking, or writing).

What we’ll provide you

We offer colleagues the opportunity to drive impact in the region while they learn and grow. As a full time Careem colleague, you will be able to:

• Work and learn from great minds by joining a community of inspiring colleagues.
• Put your passion to work in a purposeful organisation dedicated to creating impact in a region with a lot of untapped potential.
• Explore new opportunities to learn and grow every day.
• Work remotely from any country in the world for 30 days a year with unlimited vacation days per year.
• Access to healthcare benefits and fitness reimbursements for health activities including gym, health club, and training classes.