Staff Motion Designer

Pinterest’s Design Innovation team is looking for a Staff Motion Designer to define and evolve Pinterest’s motion design language across surfaces and flagship features. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role where you’ll partner with product and engineering to scale motion principles, patterns, tokens, tooling, and implementations, with a focus on AI-forward experiences.

What you’ll do

• Define and evolve Pinterest’s motion design language, including principles, interaction and transition patterns, timing and tokens, specifications, and guidance. Ensure motion stays intentional, coherent, accessible, and reusable across the product ecosystem.
• Lead motion direction for flagship and AI-forward experiences, using motion to clarify state, cause and effect, hierarchy, feedback, and progress, while keeping system responsiveness in mind.
• Collaborate across disciplines with product designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, and content designers to connect feature-level work to a shared motion strategy and raise the quality of experiences shipped.
• Translate high-craft explorations into scalable design system contributions that reduce ad hoc implementations, improve consistency, and help teams move faster with confidence.
• Prototype and validate quickly using the right medium such as motion studies, design tools, code, AI-enabled tools, or custom prototypes to accelerate decisions through shared understanding.
• Partner with engineering through implementation to address technically ambitious animation challenges while balancing performance, platform conventions, accessibility, and maintainability.
• Build enablement by developing or enabling lightweight tools, templates, and workflows that help designers explore motion ideas rapidly and help engineering teams implement sophisticated animations reliably.
• Stay ahead of AI-enabled motion and visual creation tools, applying them strategically for ideation, prototyping, and production with critical thinking and quality validation.
• Improve quality through review by conducting motion quality reviews, providing actionable feedback, and mentoring others on motion principles, systems thinking, prototype craft, and productive engineering partnership.
• Align teams by clearly explaining the rationale, tradeoffs, and user impact behind motion decisions, building consensus on 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 demonstrating exceptional motion craft in shipped digital products or platforms.
• Experience at a staff/principal level influencing horizontally across teams, shaping product or design-system direction, and raising quality without formal authority.
• Strong command of motion and interaction principles including timing, choreography, easing, spring behavior, feedback, and transitions, plus judgment about when motion improves usability, comprehension, emotion, and trust.
• Demonstrated experience creating or materially evolving scalable motion systems such as principles, token sets, pattern libraries, documentation, tooling, and governance.
• Proven ability to partner with engineers to implement complex motion with practical fluency in performance, technical constraints, platform conventions, handoff, and quality assurance.
• A design technologist mindset, comfortable using prototyping tools, AI, and code or technical workflows when useful for exploring ideas, communicating intent, and improving team output.
• Product and systems thinking to connect craft decisions to user needs, product strategy, accessibility, implementation efficiency, and measurable impact.
• Excellent communication skills for synthesizing ambiguity, creating clear documentation, facilitating critique, and aligning cross-functional partners.
• A collaborative, low-ego working style focused on learning, experimentation, mentoring, and inclusive design, including attention to reduced-motion preferences, cognitive load, and diverse user needs.
• Bachelor’s degree in design, animation, human-computer interaction, a related field, or equivalent experience.

Bonus points for

• 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 that improve motion prototyping, handoff, or implementation quality.
• Experience in large-scale consumer products, personalization, or rapid experimentation environments.

Location and schedule

New York, NY (onsite). This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6-months, and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.

Compensation

USD 158,765 - 326,870 per year.

Relocation

This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.