About the Role
As Design Team Lead, you will shape and mature an enterprise Design Studio into a scalable, governed design function. This role sits at the intersection of design leadership, operational excellence, systems thinking, and executive influence, helping ensure design is positioned as a strategic capability that drives consistency, clarity, and measurable business value.
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Responsibilities
- Lead and develop a large multidisciplinary team spanning UX, UI, Product Design, Design Systems, and DesignOps.
- Assess team skills, seniority, and capacity; maintain a skills matrix; address gaps through hiring and upskilling; allocate designers according to project needs, complexity, and capacity; and develop the next layer of design leadership.
- Define and govern a scalable design lifecycle from intake through UX, UI, Design QA, developer handover, and release.
- Establish clear gates, definitions of done, and SLAs; manage demand, capacity, and priorities; and track turnaround, rework, DLS adoption, and stakeholder satisfaction.
- Own the structure and governance of the Figma Enterprise environment, including teams, projects, libraries, access, permissions, and file lifecycle.
- Govern the Design Language System as a product, including contribution, versioning, releases, adoption, and alignment with coded components.
- Embed governed AI-assisted workflows across research, UX, UI, DLS documentation, Design QA, and design-to-code.
- Define approved tools, reusable workflows, human review points, and compliance controls, while measuring impact on productivity, cycle time, quality, and consistency.
- Represent the Design Studio with senior leadership, business and technology teams, and vendors.
- Translate complex design and AI topics into clear business narratives, influence decisions, align competing priorities, and constructively challenge requirements.
- Establish a federated governance model for internal, project, and vendor design teams.
- Lead onboarding, design reviews, and audits, enforce common standards, and prevent parallel design systems.
Requirements
- Must: Proven corporate / large-enterprise experience within complex organizational structures, governance processes and senior stakeholder environments.
- 12+ years in UX/UI, Product or Experience Design, including 5+ years leading multidisciplinary design teams.
- Experience leading a large or distributed design organization and establishing a DesignOps operating model.
- Strong hands-on Figma Enterprise expertise (libraries, variables, permissions, Dev Mode, governance).
- Proven experience building or governing an enterprise-scale design system / DLS.
- Practical experience running AI-assisted design workflows in production, not only POCs.
- Strong design-to-development collaboration with engineering teams.
- Exceptional executive presentation, storytelling and stakeholder-management skills.
