Design System Architect — Roadmap, Governance & Figma-to-Code

Into Design Systems; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Royal Mail in London is seeking a Design System Specialist to own the design side of the design system, focusing on token architecture, component design, governance and roadmap. This is a permanent full-time role with a hybrid schedule (three days on-site).

You will connect engineering, product management and design, plan the design system roadmap, monitor drift, generate documentation, support design QA and drive architecture decisions with stakeholder alignment.

Qualifications

• Strong systems thinking and holistic view of design systems.
• Experience planning and managing a roadmap across engineering, product management and design.
• Ability to articulate and defend architectural decisions to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Plan and manage the design system roadmap, prioritising work across engineering, product management and design.
• Act as the connect between engineering, product management and design leadership, translating needs and constraints.
• Manage competing stakeholder priorities and deliver to deadline under pressure, keeping the roadmap realistic.
• Architect the design system for clarity at scale, including token architecture and component guidelines.
• Own the propagation pipeline from Figma into engineering's codebase and the Figma-to-code contract, ensuring tokens and patterns are codified.
• Define and maintain conventions across Figma (structure, naming, handoff annotations) and enforce them as the team scales.
• Operate drift-monitoring agents between Figma and production, triaging issues with human judgement.
• Build automation around the system (plugins, scripts, Make workflows) to reduce repetitive work.

Skills

Systems thinking

Roadmap planning

Stakeholder management

Job description

Royal Mail in London is seeking a Design System Specialist to own the design side of the design system, focusing on token architecture, component design, governance and roadmap. This is a permanent full-time role with a hybrid schedule (three days on-site).

You will connect engineering, product management and design, plan the design system roadmap, monitor drift, generate documentation, support design QA and drive architecture decisions with stakeholder alignment.