Own your future
Our culture isn’t something people join, it’s something they build and shape. We believe that every person deserves to be heard and empowered. If you’re on the fence about whether you’re a fit, we say go for it. Let’s build something great together.
We’re looking for a Lead Design System Designer to help our client design, build, and scale a Design System that supports multiple teams and products. This is a staff-level, hands-on role for a designer who thrives at the intersection of execution and leadership.
The role blends deep system design work—designing components, foundations, and documentation—with leadership through influence: shaping standards, guiding adoption, and collaborating closely with design, product, and engineering leaders to ensure the system evolves in step with the organization.
What you’ll do
Hands-on system design
- Personally design and maintain core system components and patterns in Figma, including anatomy, variants, states, and responsive behavior.
- Build and evolve system foundations such as color, typography, spacing, layout, and motion using variables/tokens.
- Define clear, scalable component APIs at the design level, including props, variants, boolean flags, and configuration patterns that align with how components are consumed in code.
- Continuously audit, refactor, and improve libraries to keep them scalable, consistent, and easy to use.
- Create high-fidelity examples, templates, and reference patterns that product teams can use directly.
- Perform design QA on product work to ensure fidelity to the system.
Design-to-code collaboration
- Partner closely with engineers to define component contracts and ensure design decisions translate cleanly into implementation.
- Contribute to token and variable strategies that map effectively to frontend code.
- Use modern tooling such as Figma Dev Mode and Code Connect to improve handoff, reuse, and implementation accuracy.
Structure system assets and documentation to support automation and AI-assisted design-to-code workflows.
Leadership & vision
- Help define the evolution and roadmap of the Design System: what to build next, what to improve, and what to retire.
- Set clear standards and quality bars for system design, usability, and accessibility.
- Act as a trusted partner to design, product, and engineering leadership, influencing priorities and decisions.
- Mentor designers contributing to the system and raise system literacy across teams.
Adoption, enablement & quality
- Create clear, practical documentation: usage guidance, best practices, and migration support.
- Lead adoption through hands-on enablement—reviews, workshops, and direct collaboration with teams.
- Embed accessibility by default into components and patterns.
- Track system maturity, health, and adoption, using insights to guide iteration.
Must haves
- 7+ years of experience in product design, with deep, hands-on experience working on design systems in multi-team environments.
- A strong portfolio demonstrating personally built system components and foundations, not just oversight or governance.
- Advanced proficiency in Figma, including component architecture, variables/tokens, libraries, and Dev Mode workflows.
- Proven experience collaborating closely with engineering and understanding how design systems are implemented in code.
- Strong familiarity with modern frontend frameworks and product development workflows.
- Working knowledge of HTML and CSS, and a basic understanding of React concepts (no coding experience required).
- Experience with documentation platforms such as Storybook and/or Zeroheight, including system documentation and release/versioning practices.
- Experience structuring design systems for AI-assisted design-to-code workflows, including providing structured context via MCP-based approaches.
- Demonstrated ability to intake, evaluate, and prioritize new design system requests, balancing product needs, system integrity, and long-term scalability
- Prior experience as part of a centralized design system team model, owning shared foundations and enabling multiple product teams.
- Solid expertise in accessibility and inclusive design at the system level.
- Excellent communication skills—you can explain decisions clearly, give actionable feedback, and align stakeholders.
As a plus
- Experience supporting multi-platform systems (web, iOS, Android).
- Experience working with large-scale or multi-product design systems.
- Familiarity with component QA, visual regression, or system health metrics.
