ABOUT THE ROLE
Whatfix builds software at the intersection of enterprise complexity and end-user experience. Our products guide millions of users through the tools they use every day - and the quality of that experience depends, in part, on the strength of the system behind it.
We're hiring a Lead Design System Designer to own, rebuild, and evolve the Whatfix design system. The system serves approximately 16 product designers and engineers across the entire company. You're not inheriting something to maintain. You're evolving a system that needs to be rebuilt - incrementally, without forcing breaking changes across a live product portfolio. You know the difference between the right long-term architecture and what can actually ship today.
This is a specialist role. You understand the engineering surface. You work directly in system code. You can set up a Figma component library that is genuinely usable - not just visually organized. And you have the design sensibility and structured thinking to create a system people actually want to use.
You may have come up through different titles - Design Engineer, Creative Technologist, Systems Designer. What connects them is how you move: from the psychology of a user decision, to the pixel-level expression of it, to the code that makes it real. These aren't separate disciplines to you. They're different brushes. And you've welcomed every technological breakthrough that makes each of those layers more accessible than the last.
You'll report directly to the Head of Product Research and Design and operate with significant ownership and organizational reach.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
System Architecture and Rebuild
- Audit the existing design system and define a rebuild strategy - token architecture, variable structure, component hierarchy, and scalability roadmap.
- Design and implement a token architecture that is correct, scalable, and forward-compatible with AI and agentic tooling.
- Establish naming conventions, component taxonomy, and documentation standards that work for designers and engineers alike.
- Build for interoperability - the system must be usable by the tools building on top of it, not just the people.
- Design the migration path as carefully as the destination - versioning strategy, deprecation patterns, and incremental adoption that doesn't require the product org to stop and refactor.
Component Design and Engineering
- Own the Figma component library: properly structured, variable-driven, and 1:1 with what's built in code.
- Work directly in the design system codebase - updating components, managing slots, maintaining parity between the design and engineering surfaces.
- Define the full component contract: usage guidelines, do's and don'ts, required and optional attributes, edge cases, and full state coverage.
- Integrate Storybook as a living reference. The design system is not a UI kit. It's a documented, testable system.
AI-Native Patterns
- Design and document components and patterns for AI-powered and agent-driven experiences - disclosure requirements, generative content containers, confidence indicators, and interaction models that are still being defined across the industry.
- Bake AI patterns into the component architecture, not on top of it.
- Treat novel AI use cases as design problems specific to Whatfix. The work here is not adopting what other systems have done - it's designing for our problems.
Centralized Capability
- Architect for shared concerns: internationalization, accessibility, content density, theming, and directionality.
- Ensure these capabilities live in the system and don't require repeated implementation at the product level.
Adoption and Observability
- Define success metrics for the design system - not just component coverage, but adoption rates, usage patterns, and the gap between what's in the system and what actually ships.
- Drive adoption across 16 designers and the engineering organization through clear documentation, enablement, and direct partnership.
- Make the system easy to use correctly and hard to misuse.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Required
- 6+ years in product or UX design, with at least 3 years focused on design systems work as the core of your practice - not as a side responsibility.
- Demonstrated experience building or significantly rebuilding a design system from a broken or incomplete state.
- Deep token architecture knowledge: semantic layers, component tokens, global tokens, and how to structure them for scalability and AI tooling compatibility.
- Hands-on experience working in design system code - component updates, slot architecture, direct contribution to the codebase (React or equivalent).
- Figma expertise beyond aesthetics: components built with variants, variables, and properties that maintain 1:1 parity with what engineering ships.
- Experience with Storybook or equivalent documentation and component testing environments.
- Actively working at the frontier of AI-native UX - disclosure patterns, agent interfaces, generative content states. The patterns aren't settled and the field is moving fast. We're looking for someone comfortable operating at that edge, not someone with a finished playbook.
- Strong documentation skills: you define what components are for, how they behave, and when not to use them - not just what they look like.
- Understanding of content density: how to design for complex enterprise interfaces without sacrificing usability.
Nice to Have
- Experience implementing internationalization at the system level.
- Familiarity with observability or analytics tooling applied to design system adoption.
- Prior work on a design system serving a large, multi-team product organization.
- Accessibility auditing experience and practice baking compliance into component standards.
HOW YOU'LL SHOW UP
- You build, not just spec. You're not describing what engineers should build. You're in the system, making it work, and holding the line on parity between what's in Figma and what ships in code.
- You think in constructs. You understand how a design system is structured before you touch a file. Token hierarchy, component composition, slot contracts - these aren't abstract ideas. They're the work.
- You have taste and the rigor to back it up. Strong design sensibility, but you don't use it to copy what other systems have done. You design for Whatfix's specific problems and you can articulate why your decisions are right for this context.
- You design for engineers and agents, not just designers. The system has to work across every surface - for the humans consuming it and the agents building with it. You understand the engineering contract and communicate in terms engineers find useful.
- You evolve without breaking. You understand that a design system serves a live product portfolio. You sequence improvements to move the system forward without creating disruption that stops teams in their tracks.
You measure what you build. A design system without adoption is a style guide. You define success, track it, and use it to evolve the system.
#LI: #Onsite
#WorkType: #Onsite
Perks & Benefits (India)
- Best-in-class medical insurance coverage
- Free lunch & dinner buffet
- Doorstep cab drop facility
- Education sponsorship
- Internal job transfer & global mobility programs
- Scope to represent Whatfix at global events
- We also provide uncapped incentives, bonus plans and opportunities to employees (especially those in GTM teams) to travel to meet our global customers
