Technical Design System Lead

Taylor & Francis; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 1,800,000 - 3,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Taylor & Francis seeks a Technical Design System Lead in Bengaluru to own the design system as a product, defining its content, roadmap, and adoption across design and engineering. You will shape strategy, tokens, Storybook, and governance while ensuring WCAG 2.2 AA compliance and scalable adoption.

This role requires strong design sense, collaboration with product designers and frontend teams, and the ability to scale a design system within a large consumer-facing product organization.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building and scaling design systems in a large consumer-facing product organisation.
• Strong design sensibility with a coherent token architecture and system governance.
• Production-grade front-end engineering delivering accessible React components in modern codebases.
• Deep expertise in design tokens, semantic layering, theming, and bridging Figma to code.
• Proven ability to communicate technical constraints to designers and design decisions to engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own the design system roadmap and governing principles for growth and adoption.
• Design, build, and maintain a comprehensive library of reusable components and tokens.
• Establish versioning, deprecation models, and ensure WCAG 2.2 AA compliance at component level.
• Collaborate with front-end engineering leads to integrate system work into engineering workflows.
• Create documentation and onboarding materials to enable teams to adopt the system.

Skills

Design systems

Front-end engineering

Figma

React

Storybook

WCAG 2.2 AA

Tools

Storybook

Figma

React

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, youll define what enters the system, how its 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. Youll ensure the system evolves alongside T&Fs 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&Fs 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 its 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 its 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 Qualifications

• Significant experience in design systems, or a hybrid design-engineering role, with clear evidence of having built and scaled a design system in a large consumer-facing product organisation.
• Strong design sensibility a genuine eye for what makes a component well-conceived, a token architecture coherent, and a system trustworthy for the teams that depend on it.
• Production-grade front-end engineering capability you write clean, well-tested, accessible React (or equivalent framework) components and are comfortable working in a modern engineering codebase.
• Deep expertise in design tokens including semantic token architecture, theming, and the translation layer between Figma variables and code.
• Proficiency in Figma at an advanced level including component architecture, auto-layout, variables, and the maintenance of large-scale Figma libraries.
• Hands-on experience with Storybook or equivalent component documentation tooling.
• Experience designing and operating a contribution and governance model for a design system used by multiple teams.
• Strong communication skills you can explain a technical constraint to a designer and a design decision to an engineer, and you do both without condescension.
• A product mindset you think about the design system as a product with users, adoption metrics, and a roadmap, not as a library to be maintained.