Senior Designer, Accessibility & Design Systems

GitHub is looking for an experienced Systems Designer, specializing in accessibility, to lead accessible and inclusive design initiatives. You will be part of a team of skilled designers and engineers, including new teammates specializing in accessibility—you’ll have the opportunity to shape this function and have a high impact on our design system and GitHub applications. This position is embedded on the Design Infrastructure team, part of the Design organization.

GitHub is a home for all developers, so we want to ensure our applications and websites are inclusive to our customers. This role will focus on the design and delivery of inclusive UI patterns, the internal experience of implementing accessibility compliant UI, and works closely with platform and feature teams. You’ll be working closely with designers and engineers working on our design system and UI infrastructure, so that we evolve systems for the needs of our product. Our team is composed of talented individuals who have backgrounds in product design, design systems, design ops, and illustration; as well as CSS experts, and engineers with front-end and full-stack experience working in Rails and React.js.

If you enjoy technical problems, are a designer that also likes to dip their hands into code, value pairing with an engineer to translate implementation to great user experiences, and enjoy working on developer tools, you might find a happy home on the GitHub design team.

What we're looking for:

Senior Designers at GitHub are strong individual contributors; they're given a lot of autonomy and trust to work on high impact design projects. For this specific role, we're looking for someone who values the following:

- Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context to the larger system of the product, as well as ensuring we support experiences for individual features.
- Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our design system should reflect that, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Designing for inclusivity first, can lead us to solving problems for the many, and open up our product for more people.
- Creating together: Getting to the right result is our focus, this can come from systems designers or product designers, and ideally both. Facilitating collaboration between teams and individuals is key so that we continue to evolve the design system alongside the needs of the product.
- Progress and impact: Our team often works on the meta and so it's easy to get caught up in the design details. We have to be mindful of this and ensure we keep making decisions and move forward. This means being solutions oriented and prioritizing progress over correctness when it's the right call.
- Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between peers and leadership. It can take time and effort to get there but it's worth it. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes, will yield better results when we can get to the “real talk”.

Responsibilities:

- Become the teams authority on inclusive design and accessibility compliance, setting the standard for our design system and how this is embedded in GitHub’s design practice.
- Lead the design of high impact patterns, component redesigns, and cross-cutting features of our design system.
- Create interactive mockups and lightweight prototypes to communicate and validate design decisions. Participate in the design, observation, and analysis of user research
- Provide regular design feedback to other designers and engineers on accessibility and inclusive design.
- Work closely with engineers to ensure the designs are implemented effectively and iterate to refine the design and respond to customer feedback.
- Partner with select teams to share expertise on inclusive design as projects move from conception to launch, with a view to growing the project teams inclusive design practices.
- Partner with our Accessibility Product Manager to develop the roadmap for GitHub inclusive design projects in collaboration with product design leadership and engineering.
- Contribute to design systems onboarding in the area of inclusive and accessible design standards.

You might be a fit if:

- You have 2 years or more experience in accessibility and inclusive design.
- You have 5 years minimum design experience as an individual contributor.
- You have experience coaching other designers in the area of accessibility.
- You have led the design of complex components, websites, and applications.
- You have experience contributing to design systems within an organization or as part of an open-source project.
- You are confident in writing HTML & CSS and are comfortable using Git version control.
- You are familiar with using GitHub on a team or for personal projects.

These qualifications will help you stand out:

- You have first hand experience with assistive technologies.
- You have led the development of internal or open-source design systems.
- You have created or contributed to open-source projects.
- You have a technical background or experience working on developer tools.
- You have experience designing cross-platform experiences, from web to native mobile.

Who We Are:

GitHub is the developer company. We make it easier for developers to be developers: to work together, to solve challenging problems, and to create the world’s most important technologies. We foster a collaborative community that can come together—as individuals and in teams—to create the future of software and make a difference in the world.

Leadership Principles:

Customer Obsessed - Trust by Default - Ship to Learn - Own the Outcome - Growth Mindset - Global Product, Global Team - Anything is Possible - Practice Kindness

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 many Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The rest of our Hubbers work remotely around the globe. Check out an updated list of where we can hire here: https://github.com/about/careers/remote

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.