An established financial services organization in Virginia is seeking a Design Systems Lead to guide design-system strategy, governance, and adoption for a platform environment while partnering closely across design, engineering, product, and accessibility teams.
About the Opportunity:
- Schedule: Monday to Friday
- Hours: Standard business
- Setting: Hybrid (at least 3 days a week onsite; Remote work is an option for the right candidate)
Responsibilities:
- Define and evolve the platform design-system roadmap in alignment with product priorities, accessibility expectations, and enterprise design guidance
- Drive adoption of approved design patterns, components, design tokens, documentation, and contribution practices
- Establish and maintain governance, intake processes, contribution workflows, and decision criteria for the design system
- Partner with design, front-end engineering, product, accessibility, and leadership stakeholders to support consistent implementation
- Assess implementation feasibility, identify gaps in component libraries and documentation, and translate standards into actionable guidance
Qualifications:
- 5+ years of experience in design systems, product design, design operations, front-end engineering, or a related digital product discipline
- Demonstrated experience leading, governing, or significantly contributing to design-system adoption for a platform, product area, or large-scale digital experience
- Working knowledge of HTML, CSS/SCSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, and component frameworks such as React or Vue
- Experience with design tokens, theming systems, and component-library architecture
- Understanding of CI/CD and design-system delivery processes, including build, testing, release, versioning, dependency, documentation, and quality workflows
- Strong understanding of UI/UX principles, accessibility, inclusive design, and WCAG standards
- Experience with Figma and documentation platforms such as Storybook or Zeroheight
- Strong communication, facilitation, stakeholder management, leadership, and change-management skills
Desired Skills:
- Experience partnering with front-end engineering teams on component libraries, design-token pipelines, CI/CD, release governance, or documentation automation
- Hands-on experience creating prototypes, implementation examples, or component documentation using HTML, CSS/SCSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Vue, or similar technologies
- Experience working within a hybrid design-system model, adapting enterprise standards for platform-specific implementation
- Mobile or cross-platform design-system experience with React Native, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, or similar frameworks
- Background in design operations, design tooling, documentation strategy, or platform-level design-system governance
- Experience with accessibility audits, design-system quality reviews, adoption measurement, or contribution-model improvements
- Contributions to open-source design systems, UI libraries, or reusable internal platform libraries