Design System Lead: Frontend Architect for AI UI

WRITER; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous PTO

Medical and dental insurance

Paid parental leave

Fertility and family planning support

Cancer screening (Galleri)

Pension scheme

Work-life stipends: wellness

Work-life stipends: learning

Company off-sites

Stock options

Job summary

WRITER is seeking a Design Engineer to own the Writer Design System (WDS) and push craft in front-end surfaces built with TypeScript and React. You’ll collaborate with designers, PMs, and engineers to ensure production-quality components meet accessibility and performance standards.

Hybrid role with multiple hubs, including London, and compensation scaled to experience. Bring a portfolio that demonstrates systems-level work and a passion for AI-enabled workflows.

Qualifications

• 4–8+ years building production frontends with TypeScript and React.
• Strong animation instincts including easing curves, choreography, anticipation, and performance.
• Fluency in Figma at expert level — auto-layout, variants, variables, and code connect.
• A demonstrable obsession with craft, backed by a portfolio, side projects, GitHub, or production work that includes systems-level work.
• Experience driving adoption of a design system or shared platform across an engineering org.
• Experience with AI product surfaces — tool-call UIs, streaming responses, agent state, and dynamic UI rendering.

Responsibilities

• Own the Writer Design System (WDS) as your primary domain — agentify and maintain it, ensuring it's optimized for both humans and AI agents building with it.
• Design and build production-quality UI components and features, owning surfaces from sketch to ship.
• Ship design-led work that wouldn't survive an engineering backlog — polish passes, micro-interactions, and brand moments that make the product feel alive.
• Architect new primitives and extend the system's core components, shaping its technical direction while keeping documentation, examples, and libraries in sync across Figma, .md skills, and Storybook.
• Uphold the bar for front-end craft across accessibility, motion feel, consistency, and quality, ensuring accessibility is baked into every design system component.
• Help shape the design-to-code workflow, researching the latest tools and practices to unlock org-wide productivity and democratize workflows across the EPD organization.
• Partner with designers, PMs, and engineering leads to measure WDS adoption, close gaps, and make sure shipped features meet design system standards.]

Skills

TypeScript

React

Animation principles

Figma

Design system adoption

AI UI surfaces

Portfolio / production work

Craftsmanship

Storybook

Accessibility

Tools

Framer Motion

GSAP

Lottie

Job description

WRITER is seeking a Design Engineer to own the Writer Design System (WDS) and push craft in front-end surfaces built with TypeScript and React. You’ll collaborate with designers, PMs, and engineers to ensure production-quality components meet accessibility and performance standards.

Hybrid role with multiple hubs, including London, and compensation scaled to experience. Bring a portfolio that demonstrates systems-level work and a passion for AI-enabled workflows.