Staff Visual Designer, Google Drive
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 2, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 28, 2026. Google scores B on the Alion truth index.
About the job
At Google, we "Focus on the user and all else will follow." Our Visual Designers weave space, typography, color, and iconography to help people successfully navigate our products, ensuring they are beautiful and accessible. You will join our multi-disciplinary UX team, collaborating with Engineering and Product Management, to leverage user insights and create industry-leading products.
As a Visual Designer, you will rely on user-centered design methods to craft industry-leading user experiences from concept to execution. You will collaborate with your design partners to leverage and evolve the Google design language to build beautiful, innovative, inspired products that people love to use.
As a Staff Visual Designer on the Drive UX team, you will shape how billions of users visually organize, access, and interact with their digital worlds. We are seeking a highly motivated, self-driven designer with strong proactiveness and a collaborative mindset to lead the visual evolution of Google Drive.
In this role, you will define drive’s visual north star, elevating product aesthetics, motion choreography, and design systems for both high-density enterprise workflows and everyday consumer use. You will transform complex file hierarchies and emerging Gemini AI capabilities into fluid, intuitive, and trustworthy visual experiences. Partnering closely with UX, product manager, and engineering, you will bring exceptional visual craft, systems thinking, and an ownership mentality to solve ambiguous design challenges at scale.
Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.
Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.US: $188000 - $274000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits
Learn more about benefits at Google.
Responsibilities
- Establish and advocate the visual design direction across drive (Web, Android, iOS), defining typographic scale, dynamic color palettes, spatial layouts, iconography, and high-density scannability for both consumer and enterprise surfaces.
- Architect, scale, and govern robust Figma design systems and structures in close partnership with the Workspace Design System (WDS) and Carbon teams ensuring unified component consistency, theming support and cross-surface scalability across Workspace.
- Define the motion design principles and choreograph purposeful interaction transitions for drive (e.g., drag-and-drop mechanics, file preview states, loading/shimmer patterns, and navigation transitions) to clarify spatial hierarchy, orient user focus, and introduce expressive delight.
- Design next-generation visual frameworks and motion language for Gemini in drive, turning complex AI behaviors such as dynamic content synthesis, agentic workflows, and semantic search into scannable, visually trustworthy, and fluid user experiences.
Qualifications
Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
- 8 years of experience in product design or UX.
- Include a portfolio, website, or any other relevant link to your work in your resume (providing a viewable link or access instructions).
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience designing high-density productivity or complex data-heavy collaboration tools.
- Experience or strong fluency in designing for generative AI and agentic workflows (e.g., Gemini, conversational UI, dynamic synthesis, or contextual assistance).
- Solid understanding of front-end implementation constraints, accessibility standards (WCAG), and engineering handoff processes.
- Proven track record architecting, evolving, and governing enterprise-scale design systems, component libraries, and design tokens across platforms.
- Strong background in motion design, interaction prototyping, and defining functional animation principles to enhance usability.
Proven ability to operate autonomously, manage multiple workstreams, drive cross-functional alignment, and mentor other designers.