Manager (IC), Product Design - Design Systems

Manager (IC), Product Design - Design Systems

We are seeking a visionary, tech-forward Product Designer, Design Systems to join our Premium Products and Travel Design team. In this role, you will sit at the intersection of advanced system logic, human-centered design, and front-end engineering. You will operate across portfolios, ensuring our premium digital experiences scale seamlessly while maintaining an uncompromising standard of craft.

This is not a traditional Figma-only system role: you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of our component architecture—from initial tokenization in Figma to production-ready code. Furthermore, you will future-proof our design ecosystem. As generative AI and tools redefine interface production, you will transition from a traditional asset creator to an experience auditor, logic planner, and automation coach. You will design the rules, data schemas, and guardrails that govern AI-native environments, ensuring that automated outputs never compromise a cohesive customer journey.

Key Responsibilities & Competencies

• End-to-End Component Ownership: Build, govern, and maintain scalable component libraries. Act as the long-term guardian of components across design files and code repositories by collaborating directly inside the repo with engineering, reviewing code for design parity, and shipping foundational front-end updates when needed.

• AI & Automated Interface Governance: Establish the system logic, prompt criteria, and UX frameworks necessary to guide AI-generated patterns. Serve as an experience auditor to prevent fragmented user experiences.

• Systems Thinking & Data Architecture: Navigate complex tech ecosystems, mapping disparate data schemas into structurally sound user flows. Design sophisticated component interactions optimized for both human users and automated AI agents.

• Cross-Functional Pod Leadership: Act as the core design catalyst within a dedicated cross-functional pod, serving as the technical peer to engineers. Partner seamlessly with Enterprise Design Systems teams to ensure local Premium systems align or intentionally deviate from macro enterprise standards.

• Quality Assurance & Experience Metrics: Perform rigorous heuristic evaluations of live experiences. Establish clear frameworks and UX metrics to measure the health, adoption, and end-to-end coherence of system journeys.

• Design Community Leadership & Practice Maturation: Act as a player/coach and technical mentor for the design team. Lead workshops, facilitate onboarding for new product teams, and coach traditional product designers on scaling their systemic thinking and technical fluency. Champion a robust contribution governance model that empowers other designers to co-create and evolve the system without breaking core integrity.

Expected Outputs

• Production-Ready Component Repositories & Token Pipelines: Living, accessible UI component libraries and design token schemas implemented seamlessly across design files and front-end repositories.

• AI-Native Design Guardrails: Playbooks, logic schemas, and constraint models that dictate how automated tooling generates layouts without losing brand integrity.

• End-to-End Journey Optimization: Thorough gap analyses and "North Star" servicing roadmaps that align technical scalability with premium user experiences.

• Systemic Documentation: High-fidelity spec sheets, accessibility (A11y) mapping, and clear documentation governing the interaction between human intent and automated agent execution.

• Contribution Frameworks & Enablement Programs: Scalable onboarding materials, contribution guardrails, and educational workshops that upskill the design team on utilizing advanced tokens, code parity workflows, and AI-assisted design tooling.

Basic Qualifications

• At least 6 years of experience in a Product Design, Systems Design, or Design Engineering role.

• At least 5 years building and scaling multi-level design systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience navigating highly regulated, data-heavy, or premium/travel-specific digital ecosystems.

• A strong portfolio demonstrating complex systems problem-solving, UI engineering artifacts, and documentation of automated or dynamic layouts.

• Deep code literacy with the ability to navigate, review, and collaborate within front-end code repositories (e.g. React, HTML/CSS, or token pipelines). Experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools to ac