Role: Design Systems Lead

Location: Sheffield

Working Model: Hybrid – 2 days a week in the office

Salary: Up to £70,000 Dependent on experience

Build the system that powers everything else.

This role is for someone who loves creating order, clarity, and momentum at scale.

As a Design Systems Lead, you’ll take ownership of an established (or evolving) design system and shape it into something teams genuinely rely on. Your work will sit at the intersection of design and engineering, creating the foundations that help products ship faster, stay consistent, and scale with confidence.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role where your decisions will influence how designers design and how engineers build.

What you’ll be doing

Designing, building, and maintaining a design system that spans both design and code
Creating reusable components, patterns, and guidelines in Figma
Defining and managing design tokens (colour, spacing, typography, motion)
Working closely with engineers to ensure design components map cleanly to coded components
Setting clear standards for accessibility, responsiveness, and theming
Producing clear documentation so teams know when and how to use the system
Reducing UI and design decision fatigue so teams can move faster
Evolving the system as the product, team, and complexity grow

What we’re looking for

You don’t need to have done everything, but you must have real experience owning a design system.

Proven experience designing, scaling, or maintaining a design system in a product environment
Expert-level Figma skills (components, variants, variables)
Strong understanding of modern frontend development and component-based architectures (e.g. React)
Experience partnering closely with engineers on shared component models
A product-led mindset — you design to solve real problems, not just to make things look good
Comfort working in complex, data-heavy products
A solid grounding in user-centred design and evidence-based decision making

Nice to have (but not essential)