Platform Design Systems Lead
247Hire · Vienna
Key Responsibilities:
Platform Strategy & Leadership
- Define and evolve the platform design-system roadmap in alignment with product goals, platform priorities, accessibility expectations, and CMD+R enterprise guidance.
- Champion design-system adoption within the assigned platform, driving consistent use of approved patterns, tokens, components, documentation, and contribution practices.
- Represent platform needs, constraints, and feedback in design-system conversations, helping ensure CMD+R guidance can be translated into practical platform implementation.
- Provide leadership-level recommendations on platform design-system priorities, risks, technical gaps, adoption barriers, and opportunities to improve delivery workflows.
Collaboration & Governance
- Partner with platform design, engineering, product, accessibility, and enterprise design-system stakeholders to ensure platform solutions meet user, business, accessibility, and implementation needs.
- Maintain platform-level governance models, contribution workflows, intake practices, decision criteria, and scalable processes that complement CMD+R rather than duplicate or replace it.
- Facilitate conversations between designers, developers, and leadership to align expectations, clarify ownership, and improve end-to-end design-to-development handoff within the platform.
- Escalate cross-platform or enterprise-impacting questions to the appropriate CMD+R or enterprise design-system partners for alignment and decision support.
Technical Enablement & Engineering Partnership
- Apply working knowledge of front-end technologies to evaluate implementation feasibility, review platform design-system technical needs, and support effective collaboration with engineering partners.
- Partner with front-end engineers to ensure platform patterns, tokens, and components are implementable, accessible, performant, reusable, and aligned with CMD+R standards and platform realities.
- Support CI/CD and release-process improvements for platform design-system assets by collaborating on build, test, documentation, versioning, dependency management, and deployment workflows.
- Identify technical gaps in platform component libraries, token pipelines, documentation, and handoff practices; recommend practical improvements that support designers and engineers.
- Translate design-system patterns and tokens into platform implementation guidance, examples, or lightweight prototypes as needed, using modern front-end concepts without making hands-on feature development the primary focus of the role.
Documentation & Enablement
- Build and maintain platform documentation in tools such as Storybook and Zeroheight, ensuring guidance reflects CMD+R standards while addressing platform-specific implementation needs.
- Create training, workshops, office hours, and support materials to onboard platform teams, promote best practices, and improve consistent adoption across product areas.
- Document platform contribution models, component usage guidance, token application, accessibility expectations, and engineering handoff standards for both design and development audiences.
- Help teams understand when to use CMD+R guidance directly, when platform-specific guidance is needed, and when alignment with enterprise design-system partners is required.
Quality & Innovation
- Work cross-functionally to plan and conduct regular platform audits for design consistency, code alignment, accessibility conformance, documentation quality, and design-system adoption.
- Stay current with design-system, accessibility, documentation, delivery, and front-end ecosystem trends to continuously improve platform design-system functionality and usability.
- Use audit findings, adoption insights, and stakeholder feedback to prioritize improvements that reduce rework, improve implementation consistency, and strengthen platform design-system maturity.
Qualifications:
- 5+ years of experience in design systems, product design, design operations, front-end engineering, or a related digital product discipline.
- Proven track record of leading, governing, or significantly contributing to design-system adoption for a product area, platform, or large-scale digital experience.
- Working knowledge of front-end technologies such as HTML, CSS/SCSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern component frameworks or libraries such as React or Vue; ability to collaborate with engineers and evaluate technical feasibility is required, while deep hands-on coding is not the primary role expectation.
- Familiarity with design token management, theming systems, component-library architecture, and cross-platform implementation considerations.
- Understanding of CI/CD concepts relevant to design-system delivery, including build, test, release, versioning, documentation, dependency, and quality-check workflows.
- Ability to identify technical and process gaps, translate them into clear recommendations, and collaborate with designers, developers, product partners, accessibility stakeholders, enterprise design-system partners, and leadership to improve platform workflows.
- Strong understanding of design principles, UI/UX best practices, accessibility standards, and inclusive digital experience practices, including WCAG.
- Experience with design tools such as Figma and documentation platforms such as Storybook or Zeroheight.
- Excellent communication, facilitation, leadership, stakeholder management, and change-management skills.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience partnering with front-end engineering teams on component-library workflows, design token pipelines, CI/CD practices, platform release governance, or documentation automation.
- Hands-on experience creating front-end prototypes, implementation examples, or component documentation using HTML, CSS/SCSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Vue, or similar technologies.
- Experience supporting a hybrid design-system model where enterprise guidance is adapted into platform-specific implementation and adoption practices.
- Experience with mobile or cross-platform design-system considerations, including React Native, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, or similar frameworks.
- Background in design operations, design tooling, documentation strategy, or platform-level design-system governance.
- Experience supporting accessibility audits, design-system quality reviews, adoption measurement, or contribution-model improvement.
- Contributions to open-source design systems, UI libraries, or reusable internal platform libraries.