Staff Motion Designer, Design Innovation

Pinterest is looking for a thoughtful, highly skilled Staff Motion Designer to join the Design Innovation team. You will define and evolve the motion design language that brings clarity, coherence, and delight to Pinterest across surfaces and flagship features. This is a hands-on, horizontal role for a rare blend of motion craft leader, systems thinker, and design technologist. You will establish reusable motion principles, patterns, tokens, and implementation guidance within the design system; partner directly with product and engineering teams to solve challenging interaction problems; and build tools and prototypes that make it easier to explore and ship exceptional motion at scale. Your impact will extend from the details of a single interaction to the cohesive experience of Pinterest as a whole.

Join us to define the motion language that makes Pinterest’s next generation of products feel clear, capable, and unmistakably Pinterest—raising the bar for craft, trust, and coherence for millions of Pinners.

What you’ll do:

• Define and evolve Pinterest’s motion design language—principles, interaction and transition patterns, timing and tokens, specifications, and guidance—so motion is 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, progress, and system responsiveness.
• Partner horizontally with product designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, and content designers to connect individual feature work to a shared motion strategy and raise the quality of shipped experiences.
• Turn high-craft explorations into scalable design system contributions that reduce ad hoc implementation, improve consistency, and enable teams to move faster with confidence.
• Rapidly prototype and validate motion ideas using motion studies, design tools, code, AI-enabled tools, or custom prototypes.
• Work closely with engineering to solve technically ambitious animation challenges while balancing performance, platform conventions, accessibility, and maintainability.
• Develop or enable lightweight tools, templates, and workflows that help teams explore and implement sophisticated animations reliably.
• Stay at the leading edge of AI-enabled motion and visual-creation tools while maintaining critical thinking, quality validation, and ownership of final outcomes.
• Conduct motion quality reviews, give actionable feedback, and mentor designers in motion principles, systems thinking, prototype craft, and engineering partnership.
• Clearly articulate the rationale, tradeoffs, and user impact behind motion decisions to teams, leaders, and executives.

What we’re looking for:

• 8+ years of experience in motion design, product design, interaction design, or a closely related discipline, with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional motion craft in shipped digital products or platforms.
• A staff/principal-level track record of influencing horizontally across teams, shaping product or design-system direction, and raising quality without relying on formal authority.
• Deep command of motion and interaction design principles, including timing, choreography, easing, spring behavior, feedback, and transitions.
• Experience creating or materially evolving scalable motion systems, including principles, token sets, pattern libraries, documentation, tooling, and governance.
• Experience partnering closely with engineers to implement complex motion, including performance, technical constraints, platform conventions, handoff, and quality assurance.
• A design technologist mindset, with comfort using prototyping tools, AI, code, and technical workflows.
• Strong product and systems thinking, connecting craft decisions to user needs, product strategy, accessibility, implementation efficiency, and measurable impact.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills.
• A collaborative, low-ego working style with a passion for learning, experimentation, mentoring, and inclusive design.
• 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.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• 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.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

Our Commitment to Inclusion:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics. Pinterest also considers qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements, and provides medical or religious accommodations during the job application process.