Overview

GitHub is looking for a designer to join our Design Systems team. The design systems team is responsible for maintaining and evolving our design system—Primer, supporting and improving our internal style guide, and maintaining our icon system—Octicons. We work closely with product and marketing teams to support implementation of user interfaces for our websites and web applications. We’re a small team of hybrid designer-developers, some of us specializing in CSS architecture, some in front-end tooling and JavaScript, all of us with a passion to improve the user experience of customers that use GitHub, and the implementation experience for GitHub staff.

Over the past 2 years our team has focussed on improving our CSS, documentation, tooling, and publishing workflow for Primer. During this time we’ve made incremental visual updates in collaboration with the product and web design teams—including moving to system fonts, improving our typography scale, introducing bolder colors that increase color contrast, and refreshing and consolidating navigation and layout patterns. This year we’re focussing on the next evolution of Primer to build a system that works across more technologies and platforms, we’re working to ensure our design system is up-to-date and easy to work with in design and prototyping tools, and along the way we’ll keep iterating on our component documentation and design guidelines.

In this role you’ll collaborate with product and web designers to improve the visual design and usability of our design system components. You’ll work with other system designers and engineers to make decisions about component designs and how they’re represented in code—such as which properties or modifiers do we make available to the component? How should components be broken up? When do we create variations versus a new component altogether? Our team includes experienced developers but we need more design perspectives to help us make these decisions.

You will:

  • Be a core contributor to our design system, Primer, via feedback and visual explorations, or by contributing code if that’s your jam.
  • Become the teams authority on our visual design language, extending upon our existing systems (such as our color system, navigation components, and interaction patterns).
  • Design for systems that work across multiple platforms.
  • Document design patterns and write design guidelines.
  • Help us maintain our design system in design tools such as Figma.
  • Work with other designers, PMs, and engineers to help plan future projects.
  • Advocate for, and teach other designers and engineers how to use our design systems

You may be a fit if:

  • You have previous experience working in a UI design role with examples of strong visual design and interaction work.
  • You can help grow the design language of a product like GitHub.
  • You have experience contributing to design systems within an organization or as part of an open-source project.
  • You have a thorough understanding of HTML and CSS.
  • You have excellent communication and writing skills. Our team works with product, engineering, and creative teams, and many GitHubbers are remote—being able to explain the what and the why behind design systems work, is essential.
  • You have experience with GitHub and version control.

These qualifications will help you stand out:

  • Experience shipping production CSS.
  • Experience developing brands.
  • Experience creating icon systems.

Who We Are:

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over fifteen million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. With the collaborative features of GitHub.com and GitHub Business, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.

What We Value:

Collaboration: We believe the best work is done together.
Empathy: We believe in putting people first.
Quality: We believe in setting the standard for excellence.
Positive Impact: We believe in making the world a better place through our work.
Shipping: We believe in creating things for the people using them.

Why You Should Join:

At GitHub, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hubbers) to do the best work of their lives. We’ve designed one of the coolest workspaces in San Francisco (HQ), where over half of our Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The other half of our Hubbers work remotely in 18 countries across the globe.

We are also committed to keeping Hubbers healthy, motivated, focused and creative. We’ve designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we’ve built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don’t discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there’s any way we can make the interview process better for you; we’re happy to accommodate!

*Please note that benefits vary by country, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask your Talent Partner!