Lead Design Engineer

StarCompliance; Leeds; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

StarCompliance is seeking a Design System Lead to own the strategy, architecture, and evolution of our enterprise design system across products and teams in Leeds. You will shape an AI-consumable platform for engineers and agents, defining components, tokens, patterns, layouts, and accessibility standards.

You will partner with Product, Engineering, and Architecture to govern standards, coach UI engineers, and advance prototype-led discovery and AI-assisted development while ensuring usability,

Qualifications

• Strong background in design engineering, frontend engineering, or user experience design.
• Hands-on experience building modern React and TypeScript applications.
• Experience creating or governing enterprise design systems, including component architecture, design tokens, and interaction patterns.

Responsibilities

• Define strategy, architecture, and ongoing evolution of StarCompliance's enterprise design system across products and teams.
• Translate product opportunities and user needs into working prototypes with AI-assisted development.
• Define reusable components, design tokens, interaction patterns, and accessibility standards.
• Create documentation, examples, constraints, and validation mechanisms for agent-generated interfaces.

Skills

Design systems

Frontend engineering

React

TypeScript

Accessibility

Leadership

SaaS / enterprise software

Storybook

AI-assisted development

Stakeholder management

Tools

Storybook

Automated accessibility testing

Job description

How We Think About AI

At StarCompliance, AI is not a side experiment or an isolated specialist capability. We treat it as a foundational part of modern software engineering and SaaS platform development.

• Actively use AI-assisted engineering tools as part of their daily workflows.
• Apply AI to improve design quality, development velocity, automation depth, operational insight, and overall engineering effectiveness.
• Ensure AI-generated outputs are validated, auditable, and compliant with security, privacy, and regulatory standards.

Key Responsibilities

Design System & Frontend Foundations

• Own the strategy, architecture, and ongoing evolution of StarCompliance's enterprise design system, ensuring it supports consistent delivery across products and teams.
• Develop the design system into an AI-consumable platform that can be reliably used by engineers, coding assistants, and autonomous development agents.
• Define reusable components, design tokens, interaction patterns, application layouts, and accessibility standards.
• Create clear documentation, examples, constraints, and validation mechanisms that enable reliable agent-generated user interfaces.
• Maintain alignment between the design system, shared frontend foundations, and StarCompliance's wider technical architecture.
• Translate product opportunities, user needs, and business requirements into working prototypes rather than relying on static design handovers.
• Use code and AI-assisted development tools to create realistic product experiences that can be tested and refined with users.
• Work with Product, customers, subject matter experts, and engineers to explore workflows, validate solutions, and improve concepts before production delivery.
• Define interaction models for complex compliance workflows, data-intensive applications, and AI-enabled product capabilities.

Agentic Product Development

• Define how AI agents should interpret product intent and generate user interfaces using approved components and experience standards.
• Create and maintain agent instructions, reference implementations, rules, and machine-readable context for frontend development.
• Partner with AI Enablement and Engineering teams to embed design system knowledge into agentic development workflows.
• Establish governance for agent-generated interfaces, including accessibility validation, visual regression testing, and component conformance.
• Review agent outputs and improve the components, guidance, and context required to produce reliable results.

Product Experience & Accessibility

• Ensure user-centred design principles remain embedded within an increasingly automated software development process.
• Champion accessible and inclusive design, ensuring accessibility requirements built into components, patterns, and automated validation.
• Use customer feedback, product analytics, usability evaluation, and telemetry to improve product experiences.
• Ensure delivery speed does not come at the expense of usability, consistency, maintainability, or user trust.

Technical Leadership & Governance

• Lead the Design System Forum, bringing together Product, Engineering, and Architecture to govern shared standards and prioritise the continued evolution of the design system.
• Lead and develop a blended team of UI Engineers across permanent and consultancy partner resources, with responsibility for performance, workload allocation, delivery, and capability development.
• Act as StarCompliance's technical authority for design engineering and frontend experience, providing hands‑on guidance and representing the discipline within relevant governance forums.
• Coach Product Managers and engineers in prototype‑led discovery, AI-assisted development, and the effective use of shared frontend foundations.

Skills and Experience

• Strong background in design engineering, frontend engineering, or user experience design.
• Hands-on experience building modern React and TypeScript applications.
• Experience creating or governing enterprise design systems, including component architecture, design tokens, and interaction patterns.
• Practical experience using AI‑assisted development tools and supporting agentic software delivery workflows.
• Strong understanding of accessibility, inclusive design, and working prototype development.
• Strong stakeholder communication, technical leadership, and people management capability.
• Experience within SaaS, enterprise, or regulated software environments.
• Knowledge of Storybook, visual regression testing, automated accessibility testing, and frontend quality tooling.
• Experience managing permanent employees and consultancy partner resources.
• Familiarity with product analytics, usability testing, and behavioural telemetry.

StarCompliance Background Checks

All positions require pre-employment screening due to employees potentially having access to highly sensitive and confidential information involving finance and compliance; candidates must be trustworthy and have a heightened sensitivity to protecting confidential financial, professional information. To be eligible for employment with StarCompliance, candidates must undergo a rigorous background investigation with checks including, but not limited to, criminal record history, consumer credit, employment history, qualifications, and education checks.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement

We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, marital/civil union/domestic partnership status, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by country, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organisation, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. StarCompliance makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time. For more information, please request a copy of our Equal Opportunities Policy.