Design System Manager (W/M)

Our mission for 30 years? Be there at the right time!

Our expertise? Helping our clients capture the user's attention and transform this fleeting interaction into a memorable one. With this in mind, we support companies in implementing and managing digital solutions for a reinvented user experience.

What does the right interaction mean? It's capturing our attention at the right time, in the right place, and converting it into desire and trust. A subtle balance between too much and too little. Between too early and too late.

Become an SQLian and be part of this great adventure within a company on a human scale, but with big ambitions. We are more than 2,200 talented individuals in over 13 countries and 3 continents.

Our culture?

Dare and create.

We are seeking an experienced Design System Manager to work across our Design System Team. You will support the Digital Experience Leads in defining and delivering the roadmaps, ensuring seamless collaboration across teams, and managing key deliverables.

The Design System supports both web and mobile native apps, working closely with web and mobile native teams to ensure consistency across platforms. The design system team is responsible for creating and maintaining the web design system assets, while also designing for both web and app platforms.

This role requires experience with design systems, including tokens, components, patterns, and documentation, as well as familiarity with design operations and tooling. Experience in web design and development processes is also key. The ideal candidate will bring strong organisational skills, excellent communication abilities, and a solid technical understanding of design and development workflows.

Key Responsibilities

Own the product vision of the Design System

• Clear positioning: what the DS is for and what it is not

• Target users: product squads, not designers in isolation

• Metrics: adoption, reuse, contribution rate, reduction of custom UI

Acts the interface between squads and platform

• Translate squad needs into platform-level capabilities

• Decide what becomes a shared component vs what stays local

• Say no a lot, with arguments, not vibes

Manage the backlog like a real product

• Prioritize based on impact across squads, not who shouts louder

• Balance new components, improvements, tech debt, and adoption work. Sequence work so squads are unblocked, not perfectly designer

• Work with the design system team to build and maintain web design system assets, ensuring quality and usability.

Drive adoption, not just delivery

• Track usage and duplication across squads

• Push migrations, deprecations, and cleanup

• Make it easier to use the DS than to bypass it.

Align with product and tech leadership

• Sync with Product Directors on roadmap dependencies

• Align with Platform and Frontend leads on architecture and constraints

• Make tradeoffs explicit and visible

AI integration & tooling

• Identify and implement AI-assisted workflows that meaningfully improve the team's output: component documentation generation, accessibility audits, token suggestions, spec-to-code pipelines, and more.

• Evaluate AI tools critically separating useful signal from hype — and making adoption decisions based on real quality and speed gains.

• Stay ahead of the curve on how Figma, code generation tools, and LLM-based assistants are changing the designer-developer handoff.

• Establish guidelines for responsible AI use within the team: what's automated, what still needs human judgment, and why.

• Prototype and test new AI-powered workflows before scaling them — treating experimentation as part of the role, not a distraction from it.

Key Experience

• Design and Development Processes: Strong understanding of how design systems and development workflows operate, from tokens to component libraries to pattern documentation.

• Technical Understanding: Familiarity with front-end development concepts and tools (e.g., HTML, CSS, tokens, frameworks).

• Design Systems Expertise: Proven experience managing or working with design systems that support both web and mobile native platforms, including component creation, pattern standardisation, and documentation.

• Project Management: Experience defining roadmaps, creating and managing Jira tickets, and overseeing project milestones.

• Collaboration Skills: Comfortable working with web and mobile native teams to achieve shared goals.

• Strong Communication Skills: Ability to translate technical concepts into clear communication for non-technical stakeholders.

• Languages: Advanced proficiency in Spanish (ESP) and English (ENG) is required.

• Soft Skills: Highly organized, collaborative, and able to manage multiple priorities effectively

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