Design System Specialist (Hiring Immediately)

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Job reference 341213
Design System Specialist
Competitive salary plus car allowance, h ealthcare , 18% annual bonus potential, 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays rising with service and a company pension scheme with highly competitive contribution rates
Permanent, Full time
Royal Mail Farringdon x3 days in office

Design System Specialist, Design, Product and UX

Location: London Farringdon (Hybrid, 3 days per week on-site)

Royal Mail is changing how we serve our customers, and the role of design has never been more important in shaping how we do that. We are in the most significant period of transformation in our 500-year history, rebuilding the services that millions of people rely on every day. To do that well, we need exceptional designers who can connect strategy with delivery, bring people along with evidence and clear thinking, and set standards that elevate the work of everyone around them.

We are looking for a Design System Specialist to own the design side of our design system: the token architecture, component design, governance and roadmap that our digital product teams build from. You will be the connecting point between engineering, product management and design, balancing competing priorities to keep the system moving forward. If you're energised by the chance to make design work at scale, we would love to hear from you.

About the Role

As Design System Specialist, you will own the design system as the shared foundation product teams build and automate from: design language and principles, design tokens, the component library, the Figma-to-code contract, and the documentation and governance to ensure integrity and use at scale, keeping Royal Mail's brand identity consistent across every surface.

This individual contributor role sits at the intersection of design, engineering and product management. You will plan and manage the design system roadmap, operate agents that monitor drift, generate documentation and support design QA, with your focus on architecture decisions, judgement calls and stakeholder alignment.

What You'll Be Doing

At its core, this role is about building the foundation that lets the rest of the design and engineering organisation move faster, with more consistency and less rework.

Roadmap and stakeholder management

• Plan and manage the design system roadmap, prioritising and sequencing work across engineering, product management and design.

• Act as the connecting point between engineering, product management and design leadership, translating needs and constraints between the three.

• Manage competing stakeholder priorities and deliver to deadline under pressure, keeping the roadmap realistic and on track.

Design system architecture

• Architect the design system for clarity at scale: token architecture, component rules and documented decision criteria that keep the system consistent as it grows.

• Own the propagation pipeline from Figma into engineering's codebase, partnering with engineering and frontend teams so tokens, components and patterns are consumable by code as well as by designers.

• Define and maintain conventions across Figma, including file structure, layer naming and handoff annotations, and keep them enforced as the team scales.

AI-enabled practice

• Operate agents that monitor drift between Figma and production, flag issues and support design QA, reviewing outputs and triaging for where human judgement is needed.

• Build automation around the system, including plugins, scripts and Figma Make workflows, to remove repetitive work from designers and engineers alike.

Governance and quality

• Establish and maintain documentation and governance for design system components, including versioning, naming conventions, contribution guidelines and change management for both human and agent use.

• Lead design system audits and accessibility reviews, ensuring components meet WCAG 2.2 AA by default.

Adoption and enablement

• Run regular design system office hours and hands-on support for designers and engineers across teams, driving effective adoption in addition to component documentation.

• Define and track adoption KPIs that measure the design system's impact on delivery speed, consistency, and quality.

• Make the case for system investment to product and engineering leadership, building the stakeholder relationships that keep the system funded and prioritised.

• Embed design system adoption into platform modernisation and journey rebuild work, so new products default to system-based design from the outset.

About You

You will bring strong systems thinking, experience planning and managing a roadmap across multiple stakeholder groups, and the stakeholder skills to make the case for why the system matters.

Essential Experience and Skills

• A track record of leading design system or platform design capability within a product organisation, evidenced by a portfolio of system architecture, tokens and documented governance.

• Experience translating brand identity and visual language into a scalable design system, ensuring tokens and components stay true to the brand as it grows.

• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS and at least one component-based front-end framework, enough to communicate fluently with engineers and specify tokens that propagate cleanly.

• Demonstrated practice building or operating automation around design tools such as Figma plugins, scripts or Figma Make.

• Comfort writing structured prompts and iterating on rule sets that govern agent behaviour around the design system.

• Strong systems thinking, understanding the needs humans and agents as consumers of the system.

• Track record of stakeholder management, making the case for system investment with product and engineering leadership.

• Proven experience supporting WCAG 2.2 AA and inclusive design principles within design systems.

• Experience planning and managing a design system or platform roadmap, prioritising and sequencing work across engineering, product management and design.

• Proven ability to work as the connecting point between these groups, managing competing priorities and delivering to deadline under pressure.

Personal Attributes

• Systems thinker, comfortable holding architecture-level detail and the bigger picture at once.

• Pragmatic and focused on adoption and real-world usage.

• Confident making the case for system investment to senior stakeholders.

• Comfortable managing competing stakeholder priorities and delivering to deadline under pressure.

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