Product Design Lead

Role Overview

• Evolve the design system and guidance
• Define and drive the long-term vision and strategy for the design system across products.
• Own and evolve system foundations
• components, tokens, patterns, layouts
• to support scale and consistency.
• Author the guidance layer that turns the system into good decisions: usage guidelines, do’s and don’ts, content and interaction patterns, accessibility expectations, and design principles.
• Make the system machine-readable: structured component metadata, tokens-as-API, and MCP-compatible documentation so AI agents and humans consume the same source of truth.
• Define a clear contribution model so teams can extend the system without forking it.
• Drive adoption across teams
• Treat adoption as a product. Understand where teams struggle, lower the cost of doing the right thing, and remove reasons to go off-system.
• Run the enablement motion: documentation, onboarding, office hours, design reviews, paired sessions, and internal training.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering leads to embed the system into their planning, review, and shipping workflows.
• Define and track adoption and quality metrics (component coverage, off-system usage, design-to-code drift, accessibility conformance) and report on them.
• Build the AI harness teams use to design and build features
• Shape and ship the tooling that lets product teams use AI agents to generate feature designs and front-end implementations that conform to our system by default. You define the harness; teams use it to do their own design and build work.
• Identify high-impact AI use cases that improve team velocity and quality, and prioritize which to operationalize
• Build and operationalize practical AI “harnesses” that teams use directly, including:
• Rapid prototyping and generation of feature designs and variants from briefs.
• Design-to-code alignment and implementation verification against system components.
• Automated design validation and consistency checks (system conformance, accessibility, content rules).
• Author the eval set and guardrails that decide when AI-generated UI is on-system, accessible, and ready to ship
• so quality is enforced continuously, not by manual review.
• Define the contracts, prompts, and feedback loops that keep AI-generated output on-system and on-brand.
• Partner with engineering on the underlying infrastructure (component metadata, model integrations, evaluation harness, agent integrations such as MCP).
• Quality, collaboration, and leadership
• Establish quality standards and introduce scalable, automated design QA that runs continuously rather than as a manual gate.
• Improve collaboration between design and engineering: handoff, documentation, shared ownership of components, and tighter feedback loops.
• Mentor product engineering teams and influence cross-functional stakeholders to raise the overall quality bar
• through systems, tooling, and rituals rather than by taking on their work.

Requirements

• Strong experience leading or scaling design systems in a multi-team environment.
• A platform and enablement mindset
• you measure your impact by what other teams ship, not by what you design yourself.
• Solid product design foundation, with the ability to operate at both strategic and hands-on levels.
• Hands-on experience with AI tooling for design and development, with concrete fluency in prompt design for component generation, agent/MCP integration, and authoring evals for generated UI.
• Experience working closely with engineering teams and a strong understanding of implementation constraints.
• Proven ability to introduce new tools, workflows, and ways of working at team or organizational scale, and to drive adoption of them.
• Systems thinking with a pragmatic approach to balancing consistency and speed.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and shaping new areas.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with front-end technologies and component-driven development
• Experience building internal tools, platforms, or design infrastructure
• Track record of influencing senior stakeholders and driving cross-team alignment

Tech Stack

• TypeScript

Benefits

• 25 days Holiday per year (increase by 1 day per year to 30 days max) + Bank Holidays
• Hybrid working arrangements
• Contributory pension scheme
• Enhanced Parental leave
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality
• Access to Oliva our Mental Health Therapy partners
• Discounted Gym membership
• Financial Coaching with Octopus Wealth
• 2 days of volunteering leave per year
• Sabbatical after 5 years’ service
• Life Assurance – MetLife (UK employees only).
• Ongoing Learning and Development to support you reach your career goals