Senior Design Systems & Ops Designer

Job description

At Qualgo, we believe great design teams begin with strong foundations. Reporting to the Product Design Manager, you'll manage and evolve our design systems across all Qualgo products, and build the tooling, workflows and guardrails that let our designers "vibe design" — explore and prototype quickly with AI — while staying consistent with our systems and security standards.

This is not a feature-design role: your users are our designers and engineers. It suits someone who combines systems thinking, curiosity about AI and a pragmatic, operational mindset.

Key responsibilities

Design System Ownership & Operations

• Own and maintain Qualgo's design systems across all products — including foundations (tokens, color, typography, spacing), components, patterns and documentation.

• Drive consistency across products while handling legitimate platform and product differences (iOS, Android, web, desktop).

• Define and run the design system governance model: contribution process, review criteria, versioning, release notes and deprecation.

• Partner with front-end engineers to keep design and code in sync (e.g. design tokens, component mapping, Code Connect or equivalent), and audit implementations for drift.

• Track design system health and adoption through usage metrics, audits and team feedback, and prioritize improvements accordingly.

• Encode platform guidelines (iOS Human Interface Guidelines, Android Material Design) and accessibility standards (WCAG) into the system so they're applied by default.

AI-Enabled Design Foundations

• Evaluate, select and roll out AI design and prototyping tools that fit our team, products and security requirements.

• Build AI-ready design system assets — such as machine-readable specs, token and component documentation, prompt templates and context packs — so AI tools produce output that respects our systems.

• Design and document end-to-end AI-assisted workflows, from idea to prototype to design-system-compliant handoff, and set clear guidance on when AI should and shouldn't be used.

• Define guardrails for AI use in design: quality checks, design system compliance checks, data and confidentiality rules, and review steps before work moves to engineering.

• Enable the design team through onboarding, playbooks, workshops and hands-on support, and continuously improve workflows based on adoption and feedback.

• Stay current with fast-moving AI design tooling and share practical learnings across Design, Product and Engineering.

Design Team Operations

• Improve design team workflows, file structure, naming conventions, libraries and handoff standards to reduce friction and rework.

• Gather feedback from designers and engineers through interviews, surveys and workflow observation, and turn insights into operational improvements.

• Partner with Design and Product leadership to align design operations with product roadmap priorities.

Qualifications

Required:

• Proven experience owning or maintaining a design system in production, including components, tokens, documentation and governance.

• 4+ years of experience in product design, design systems or design operations.

• Expert proficiency in Figma, including libraries, variables, component properties, and branching or equivalent workflows.

• Understanding of how design tokens, component variants/properties and states map to code, enough to align with engineers and review AI-generated output against the system (no coding required).

• Hands-on experience using AI tools in a design or prototyping workflow, with a clear point of view on their strengths, limits and risks.

• Strong understanding of platform guidelines (iOS Human Interface Guidelines, Android Material Design) and accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA).

• Strong systems thinking and documentation skills — able to turn complex rules into clear, usable guidance.

Nice to have:

• Bachelor's degree in Interaction Design, Visual Design, HCI, Computer Science or related field.

• Experience managing design systems across multiple products or brands at scale.

• Working knowledge of front-end technologies (HTML/CSS, React basics).

• Experience with design token pipelines (e.g. Tokens Studio, Style Dictionary) or Figma-to-code tooling.

• Experience writing prompts, specs or structured context for LLM-based tools, or building lightweight automations (Figma plugins, scripts).

• Experience defining tooling policies in a security- or compliance-sensitive environment.

• Strong communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to drive adoption across teams without direct authority.

• Growth mindset, adaptability, and curiosity to explore new technologies.