Staff Motion Designer

Pinterest is hiring a Staff Motion Designer for the Design Innovation team in Los Angeles, CA (onsite). This role defines and evolves Pinterest’s motion design language across product surfaces and flagship, AI-forward experiences. You’ll work hands-on and cross-functionally to build scalable motion systems, prototype quickly, develop lightweight tooling, and partner with engineering to ship motion that is intentional, coherent, accessible, and reusable.

What you’ll do

• Define and evolve Pinterest’s motion design language, including interaction and transition patterns, timing and tokens, specifications, and guidance.
• Set motion direction for flagship and AI-forward experiences, using motion to clarify state, cause and effect, hierarchy, feedback, progress, and system responsiveness.
• Partner with product designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, and content designers to connect feature work to a shared motion strategy and improve the quality of what ships.
• Convert high-craft explorations into scalable design system contributions that reduce ad hoc implementation and improve consistency.
• Rapidly prototype and validate motion ideas using the right medium, including motion studies, design tools, code, AI-enabled tools, or custom prototypes.
• Work closely with engineering throughout implementation to handle technically ambitious animation while balancing performance, platform conventions, accessibility, and maintainability.
• Develop or enable lightweight tools, templates, and workflows that help designers explore and help engineering build sophisticated animations reliably.
• Stay current with AI-enabled motion and visual-creation tools, applying them strategically while maintaining critical thinking and quality validation.
• Run motion quality reviews, provide actionable feedback, and mentor others on motion principles, systems thinking, prototype craft, and productive engineering partnership.
• Communicate motion rationale, tradeoffs, and user impact to teams and leaders to build alignment around a high bar for craft and system quality.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of experience in motion design, product design, interaction design, or a closely related field, with a portfolio showing exceptional motion craft in shipped digital products or platforms.
• A staff or principal-level track record influencing horizontally, shaping design-system direction, and raising quality without relying on formal authority.
• Deep knowledge of motion and interaction principles, including timing, choreography, easing, spring behavior, feedback, and transitions, plus strong judgment about usability, comprehension, emotion, and trust.
• Proven experience building or materially evolving scalable motion systems such as principles, token sets, pattern libraries, documentation, tooling, and governance.
• Hands-on experience partnering with engineers to implement complex motion, with practical fluency in performance, constraints, platform conventions, handoff, and quality assurance.
• A design technologist mindset, comfortable using prototyping tools, AI, and code when helpful for exploring ideas and improving how teams design and build.
• Strong product and systems thinking, connecting craft decisions to accessibility, implementation efficiency, user needs, strategy, and measurable impact.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills for synthesizing ambiguity, documenting clearly, facilitating critique, and aligning cross-functional partners.
• Collaborative, low-ego approach with a passion for learning, experimentation, mentoring, and inclusive design, including considering reduced-motion preferences, cognitive load, and diverse user needs.
• A Bachelor’s degree in design, animation, human-computer interaction, a related field, or equivalent experience.

Bonus points

• Experience defining motion for AI, conversational, multimodal, or other emerging product experiences.
• Experience contributing to platform-wide design systems, public motion systems, or open-source animation libraries.
• Experience building designer-facing or engineer-facing tools to improve motion prototyping, handoff, or implementation quality.
• Experience in large-scale consumer products, personalization, or rapid experimentation environments.

Location, schedule, and relocation

This role is onsite in Los Angeles, CA. In-person collaboration is expected 1–2 times every 6-months, and the role can be situated anywhere in the country. This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

Salary range: USD 158,765 to 326,870 per year.