Technical Design System Lead

Job Description At T&F scale, design quality depends on the system designers work within. A well-governed design system enables consistency, accessibility, and speed; a neglected one creates technical debt and fragmentation. The Technical Design System Lead owns this infrastructure, treating it as a product with a roadmap, contribution model, and adoption strategy. Reporting to Head of Product Design, you'll define what enters the system, how it's built, documented, and used across design and engineering. This rare role requires genuine design sensibility, the ability to evaluate whether components, token architecture, and system decisions empower designers or constrain them. You'll ensure the system evolves alongside T&F's platform transformation. Design System Strategy & Roadmap You own the strategic direction of the design system, making active decisions about its content, priorities, and evolution not just responding to team requests. - Define and maintain the design system roadmap, identifying gaps, deprecating outdated patterns, and sequencing improvements based on adoption data, design team needs, and product direction - Establish a clear vision for the design system: its purpose, scope, and governing principles for growth - Track and report on system health, adoption rates, component coverage, accessibility compliance, and the ratio of system-compliant to bespoke implementations - Contribute to design strategy conversations, advising on how system capabilities enable or constrain product design direction - Stay informed about T&F's evolving product portfolio to ensure new domains, interaction patterns, and platform capabilities are reflected in the system Component Design & Token Architecture You make the foundational decisions that every designer and engineer builds on. - Design, build, and maintain a comprehensive library of reusable components covering all core interaction patterns, states, variants, and responsive behaviours - Architect and govern design tokens, defining the semantic layer between raw values and component application to ensure intentional design decisions across all products - Maintain Storybook (or equivalent) as the single source of truth for component documentation, behaviour, and usage guidelines - Establish a versioning and deprecation model that allows system evolution without breaking existing implementations - Ensure all components meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards as a baseline, building accessibility in at the component level Design–Engineering Partnership You invest in the relationships and processes that make system adoption the path of least resistance. - Work closely with front-end engineering leads to ensure robust, well-tested code implementation integrated into engineering workflows - Bridge the gap between design intent and engineering implementation, identifying precisely where Figma and React components diverge and why - Collaborate with Product Designers to understand how the system is used in practice, where it helps, where it's worked around, and what that reveals about needed evolution - Support engineering teams in system adoption through clear documentation, onboarding sessions, and responsive implementation support without creating bottlenecks Accessibility & Quality Standards You set and maintain accessibility as an engineering and design standard built into the system from the ground up. - Own the accessibility standard, ensuring every component meets WCAG 2.2 AA compliance with documented accessibility guidance for implementation teams - Work with the accessibility practice or external auditors to validate component-level accessibility and incorporate findings into the roadmap - Build automated accessibility testing into the component development pipeline, preventing regressions and making compliance continuous - Champion accessibility as a product quality standard throughout the design and engineering organisation Documentation & Enablement - Own design system documentation, ensuring it's comprehensive, accurate, current, and written for users, not builders - Produce usage guidelines explaining when to use components, when not to, and how to compose them correctly in real product contexts - Create onboarding materials and reference guides enabling new designers and engineers to become productive quickly and independently