Product Design Lead

Role Overview

We're hiring a Product Designer to lead the next chapter of our design system and define how AI agents are used to design and build product features. This is a platform and enablement role: you raise the quality and velocity of every team by evolving the system, the guidance around it, and the AI harness that teams use - not by designing features yourself.

You'll work at the intersection of design, engineering, and AI - setting direction, shipping practical tooling, and helping product teams design and build with confidence on top of what you provide.

What This Role Is - and Isn't

• It is: owning the design system, the guidance and patterns around it, the adoption motion across teams, and the AI agent harness that teams use to generate feature designs.
• It is not: designing individual features, screens, or flows on behalf of product teams. Those teams design their own features using your system and AI tooling - your job is to make that path clear, fast, and high-quality.

Key Responsibilities

Evolve the design system and guidance

• Define and drive the long-term vision and strategy for the design system across products.
• Own and evolve system foundations - components, tokens, patterns, layouts - to support scale and consistency.
• Author the guidance layer that turns the system into good decisions: usage guidelines, do’s and don’ts, content and interaction patterns, accessibility expectations, and design principles.
• Make the system machine-readable: structured component metadata, tokens-as-API, and MCP-compatible documentation so AI agents and humans consume the same source of truth.
• Define a clear contribution model so teams can extend the system without forking it.

Drive adoption across teams

• Treat adoption as a product. Understand where teams struggle, lower the cost of doing the right thing, and remove reasons to go off-system.
• Run the enablement motion: documentation, onboarding, office hours, design reviews, paired sessions, and internal training.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering leads to embed the system into their planning, review, and shipping workflows.
• Define and track adoption and quality metrics (component coverage, off-system usage, design-to-code drift, accessibility conformance) and report on them.

Build the AI harness teams use to design and build features

Shape and ship the tooling that lets product teams use AI agents to generate feature designs and front-end implementations that conform to our system by default. You define the harness; teams use it to do their own design and build work.

• Identify high-impact AI use cases that improve team velocity and quality, and prioritize which to operationalize
• Build and operationalize practical AI “harnesses” that teams use directly, including:

- Rapid prototyping and generation of feature designs and variants from briefs.

- Design-to-code alignment and implementation verification against system components.- Automated design validation and consistency checks (system conformance, accessibility, content rules).

• Author the eval set and guardrails that decide when AI-generated UI is on-system, accessible, and ready to ship - so quality is enforced continuously, not by manual review.
• Define the contracts, prompts, and feedback loops that keep AI-generated output on-system and on-brand.
• Partner with engineering on the underlying infrastructure (component metadata, model integrations, evaluation harness, agent integrations such as MCP).

Quality, collaboration, and leadership

• Establish quality standards and introduce scalable, automated design QA that runs continuously rather than as a manual gate.
• Improve collaboration between design and engineering: handoff, documentation, shared ownership of components, and tighter feedback loops.
• Mentor product engineering teams and influence cross-functional stakeholders to raise the overall quality bar - through systems, tooling, and rituals rather than by taking on their work.

• Define and drive the long-term vision and strategy for the design system across products
• Own and evolve system foundations (components, tokens, patterns) to support scale and consistency
• Drive adoption across teams while balancing standardization with flexibility
• Shape how AI is used within design and development workflows
• Build and operationalize practical AI “harnesses” for:

- Design validation and consistency checks

- Design-to-code alignment and implementation verification

- Rapid prototyping and generation of design variants

- Identify and implement high-impact AI use cases that improve team velocity and quality

- Establish quality standards and introduce scalable (including automated) design QA processes

- Improve collaboration between design and engineering, including handoff, documentation, and shared ownership

- Mentor designers and influence cross-functional stakeholders to raise the overall quality bar

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

• Strong experience leading or scaling design systems in a multi-team environment.
• A platform and enablement mindset - you measure your impact by what other teams ship, not by what you design yourself.
• Solid product design foundation, with the ability to operate at both strategic and hands-on levels.
• Hands-on experience with AI tooling for design and development, with concrete fluency in prompt design for component generation, agent/MCP integration, and authoring evals for generated UI.
• Experience working closely with engineering teams and a strong understanding of implementation constraints.
• Proven ability to introduce new tools, workflows, and ways of working at team or organizational scale, and to drive adoption of them.
• Systems thinking with a pragmatic approach to balancing consistency and speed.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and shaping new areas.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with front-end technologies and component-driven development
• Experience building internal tools, platforms, or design infrastructure
• Track record of influencing senior stakeholders and driving cross-team alignment

Benefits

• 25 days Holiday per year (increase by 1 day per year to 30 days max) + Bank Holidays

• Hybrid working arrangements

• Contributory pension scheme

• Enhanced Parental leave

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality

• Access to Oliva our Mental Health Therapy partners

• Discounted Gym membership

• Financial Coaching with Octopus Wealth

• 2 days of volunteering leave per year

• Sabbatical after 5 years’ service

• Life Assurance – MetLife (UK employees only).

• Ongoing Learning and Development to support you reach your career goals

Our Values – or what we call “Vitesse at Our Best”

The Vitesse values are a true reflection of what it takes to thrive in our business, so it’s important to us that any employee who joins our business is aligned with these 3 attributes

Driven to Succeed
We’re ambitious about the opportunity ahead and committed to achieving it together. We hold ourselves to high standards, take pride in what we deliver, and push for meaningful outcomes for our customers, our partners, and each other.

Tenacious Responsibility
We take ownership of our work, our decisions, and our results. We face challenges with resilience, learn from setbacks, and see things through to completion. Because doing the right thing matters.

Confident Humility
We believe the best ideas come from listening and learning. We leave ego at the door, ask for help when we need it, and celebrate collective success. When one of us wins, we all do.

WE ARE AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

We are committed to creating an inclusive environment that enables everyone to perform at their best, where we recognise the rights of all individuals to mutual respect and where there is an unbiased acceptance of others. Our policies and practices aim to promote an environment that is free from all forms of Unfair discrimination and values the diversity of all people. At the heart of our policy, we seek to treat people fairly and with dignity and respect. If you need any reasonable interview adjustments please let us know by contacting our head of talent on [email protected]