The Role
We're looking for a Design System Designer to take ownership of our evolving design system and bring it from a patchwork of foundational pieces into a mature, scalable toolkit that serves our product teams. Our system already has a token layer and a foundational set of components, but it needs a dedicated steward to fill the gaps, resolve inconsistencies, and turn it into something our designers and engineers love using.
This person will be shaping how our entire product organization thinks about UI consistency, accessibility, efficiency, and quality. You'll work closely with product designers, engineers, and product managers to understand what they need, then build and advocate for the system that delivers it.
Core Accountabilities
- Audit and evolve the existing system. Map what we have today (tokens, components, patterns) against what our product actually requires. Identify gaps, redundancies, and inconsistencies. Build a prioritized roadmap for closing those gaps based on real product needs, not theoretical completeness.
- Design and specify components. Create new components and refine existing ones, delivering detailed specs that cover anatomy, states, variants, interaction behavior, responsive considerations, and accessibility requirements. You'll own the Figma component library and ensure it stays tightly aligned with what engineering ships.
- Establish and document standards. Write clear, practical guidelines for usage, composition, layout, spacing, typography, color application, motion, and content. Documentation should help a designer or engineer make the right choice quickly, not bury them in theory.
- Champion accessibility. Bake compliance into every component and pattern from the start. Define color contrast requirements, screen reader behavior, and keyboard interaction so accessibility is a default, not an afterthought.
- Collaborate with engineering. Partner with front-end engineers to ensure design specs translate cleanly into code. Participate in implementation reviews, flag drift between design and code, and help establish a shared language and process for contribution and updates.
- Drive adoption and contribution. A design system only works if people use it. Run office hours, present updates, gather feedback, and make it easy for other designers and engineers to contribute improvements back to the system.
- Manage governance and versioning. Define how changes get proposed, reviewed, and released. Establish a clear process for deprecation, breaking changes, and versioning so teams can adopt updates with confidence.
What We're Looking For
Required Experience and Skills
- Experience. 4+ years in product design, with at least 2 years focused on design systems work — building, maintaining, or significantly contributing to a system used by multiple teams. Startup or high-growth experience is a strong plus; you're comfortable with ambiguity and know how to make pragmatic tradeoffs between rigor and speed.
- Systems thinking. You naturally see the connections between individual components and the larger patterns they serve. You think in terms of composability, scalability, and reuse. You can zoom out to set strategy and zoom in to agonize over the padding on a button.
- Design craft. Strong visual and interaction design skills. You have a sharp eye for consistency, hierarchy, spacing, and typography. Your Figma files are well-organized and your component architecture is thoughtful.
- Accessibility fluency. Working knowledge of accessibility standards and how they apply to interactive components. You don't need to be an accessibility engineer, but you should be able to spec the accessible behavior of a component without prompting.
- Communication. Excellent written and verbal communication. You can write documentation that engineers and designers actually read. You can present a rationale for a design decision to a skeptical audience and bring them along. You handle feedback — including pushback — with openness.
- Cross-functional collaboration. You've worked embedded with or closely alongside front-end engineers and understand the constraints and trade-offs of implementation. You know enough about component-based front-end architecture to have productive technical conversations. Bonus points if you have experience with Angular components and Tailwind conventions.
- Comfort with influence over authority. In a startup, you won't have a mandate — you'll need to earn trust, demonstrate value, and persuade teams to adopt what you build. You're energized by that dynamic, not frustrated by it.
Strongly Preferred
- Familiarity with cybersecurity, risk management, compliance, or regulated industries
- Experience working with compliance or security frameworks (e.g., NIST, ISO, SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA)
- Background working in GRC, CCM, automation, or continuous compliance domains
Bonus Points For
- Prior experience at a high-growth startup or scaling SaaS company
