Workiva: Principal Experience Designer - Visual Design & Design Systems

Workiva is looking for a Principal Experience Designer to shape the visual future of Unify, our enterprise design system. Unify powers the components, patterns, templates, accessibility standards, and shared experiences used across Workiva’s B2B platform.

This is a dual-focus principal role. Roughly 60–70% of your time will be spent leading Unify’s visual design direction: evolving its visual language, shaping token architecture, and creating the reference designs and guidance that help teams build consistently. The remaining 30–40% will focus on high-visibility visual work for major conferences, marketing partnerships, and executive audiences. That work is part of the broader ecosystem of design in which Unify lives. You will bring exceptional visual craft, strong systems thinking, and a practical point of view on how design systems need to evolve for AI-assisted design and prototyping.

What you'll do:

- Define and evolve Unify’s visual language across typography, color, spacing, iconography, motion, and brand expression.

- Partner with the components sub-team and patterns/templates sub-team to ensure visual design is applied consistently.

- Partner with product design, product management, and engineering teams to translate decisions from system to production.

- Maintain a scalable, semantic token architecture supporting consistent product experiences over time.

- Create and maintain a library of reference designs and full-screen examples demonstrating system application.

- Own visual usage guidance and documentation for designers, engineers, and AI-assisted workflows.

- Establish ongoing evaluation of AI-generated designs and prototypes to strengthen tokens and guidance.

- Lead visual design for select high-stakes moments, including conferences, executive presentations, product vision, and marketing partnerships.

- Coach designers and influence cross-functional partners through high-quality feedback and visual storytelling.

Workiva supports employees working remotely or from an office within their country of employment, with up to 20-25% travel required.