About this role
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 t