Opportunities in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Careem is building the Everything App for the greater Middle East — making it easy to move around, order food and groceries, manage payments, and more. Our purpose is simple: to simplify and improve people’s lives and build an awesome organisation that inspires. Since 2012, Careem has enabled earnings for over 2.5 million Captains, simplified the lives of more than 70 million customers, and built a platform where the region’s best talent and entrepreneurs thrive. We operate in 70+ cities across 10 countries, from Morocco to Pakistan.

We’re now entering our next chapter — one powered by AI. We’re looking for AI talent: curious problem-solvers who know how to apply AI to build tools, automate workflows, and create real impact. Whether it’s streamlining operations, enhancing customer experience, or reimagining internal systems — we want people who can make Careem work smarter and move faster.

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.