UX/Visual Designer

Job description

**Introduction**

The Carbon Design System is IBM’s open-source design system for products and experiences.

With the IBM Design Language primitives at its core, Carbon consists of working code, design tools and resources, and guidelines—all serving, and served by, a vibrant community of contributors.


A design system is a collection of pre-built, reusable assets—components, patterns, guidance, and code—allowing users to build consistent digital experiences faster.

Using the pre-built and universal assets of Carbon minimizes the time teams spend designing and building.

Instead of building and re-building basic elements, they can spend that time customizing their products to address specific client use cases.


The design system is named Carbon Design System because in nature the element carbon builds complex structures from simpler compounds.

This motif mimics how our styles and components can combine to make beautifully complex, natural, and intuitive designs.

**Your role and responsibilities**

We are looking for a passionate, proactive, and experienced Designer to help evolve and deliver Carbon.

We’re looking for a decisive, systematic thinker with a passion for best-practice UX—someone who can build relationships across the whole of IBM, and coalesce those needs into scalable solutions.

Our ideal candidate would feel comfortable speaking and presenting in front of large groups to help educate and up-level other designers at IBM.


This position requires strong visual design skills, an understanding of product delivery, and a focus on high-quality user experience design in particular.

Candidates should be interested in systems thinking, responsive grids, content hierarchy, component design, and UX pattern creation.

They must also be able to deal with ambiguity and be self-motivated.

Our team depends on collaboration, rigorous exploration, and openness (our work is open-source), and candidates should be practiced in sharing work in progress and giving and receiving critiques.


Candidates should be creative, detail-oriented, curious, and comfortable with cross-disciplinary collaboration.

They should have prior experience solving complex design problems for Web or software interactions and should be capable of translating user research into design patterns that provide delightful, consistent, and efficient experiences to users.

They must also be able to articulate desired outcomes to developers and work collaboratively to find alternatives when there are technical constraints.


Keen written and verbal communication skills, along with an interest in docs-writing are a must.

Our ideal candidate will also be able to produce and enhance low-fidelity sketches and medium-fidelity wireframes to facilitate communication of recommended solutions and create high-fidelity product-ready designs.


IBM builds products and solutions that change the world.

The designers on Carbon will drive the user experience for all those solutions.

**Required technical and professional expertise**

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3+ years of delivering product design

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Experience in designing and shipping software products and applications

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Experience in systems thinking and design

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Experience in solving complex user problems and user interface design

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Expert skills in visual design principles including typography, layout, imagery, color, etc.

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Portfolio and work samples, including user-centered design skills including visualizations of complex experiences such as stories, flows, scenarios, personas, etc.

(any fidelity), sketches to mid-fidelity interactions (show your process), clickable prototypes (any fidelity) and high-fidelity delivered product work

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Excellent proficiency with Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, and presentation tools like Keynote

**Preferred technical and professional experience**

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Experience designing for accessibility

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Understand limitations of web technologies including: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Web Components etc.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics.

IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

Required Skill Profession

Other General