(Staff / Lead) Product Designer - Design Systems

Lead the evolution of Hive's design system and partner with engineering to ensure high-fidelity implementation. Establish governance and create documentation to streamline design processes across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of our design system across Hive’s product suite. Defining long-term strategy, system architecture and how we scale quality
• Partner closely with engineering counterparts to evolve our system and maintain design–dev parity (e.g. Storybook, tokens), ensuring high-fidelity implementation and scalable architecture
• Design and document reusable components, patterns and design tokens that enable consistency across products while leaving room for thoughtful variation
• Establish and improve system governance (e.g. contribution models, adoption processes) in partnership with engineering — ensuring our system is robust, flexible and well-maintained
• Drive the creation of internal documentation, tooling and rituals that enable designers and engineers to confidently use, extend and evolve the system
• Champion accessibility and usability across all facets of the system, ensuring components meet best practices and align with WCAG standards
• Mentor other designers across the team, sharing systems knowledge and raising the bar for design quality and systems thinking in a supportive, generous way
• Lead initiatives that improve our systems maturity, from evolving component libraries to piloting automation or AI-driven workflows
• Help define how we measure quality, scale design craft and support a shared culture of excellence across the design team and beyond
• Collaborate across Product, Design and Engineering as part of a core team shaping systems and enablement strategy at Hive — laying the foundations for our next chapter of scale

Requirements

• Experience owning or co-owning a design system — from evolution and adoption to maintenance and governance
• Strong systems design portfolio with a high bar for interaction, visual and implementation detail
• Deep experience in Figma and exposure to working with design tokens, Storybook or other component-driven frameworks
• Strong cross-functional collaborator, with a track record of driving alignment with engineers and crafting tools or workflows that scale across teams
• Comfortable with ambiguity and highly autonomous; able to shape the system’s roadmap and vision, not just execute on it
• Passionate about mentorship, knowledge-sharing and elevating the team around you
• Pragmatic, outcome-focused and capable of navigating trade-offs between design purity and engineering feasibility
• Experience in B2B SaaS or internal tools is a plus
• Prior exposure to design automation, AI tooling, or design ops is a bonus
• Experience introducing accessibility improvements in a systems context is a bonus

Key Skills

• Systems design
• Figma
• Design tokens
• Storybook
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Systems thinking
• Mentorship
• Outcome-focused
• Trade-offs between design purity and engineering feasibility
• Design automation
• AI tooling
• Design ops
• Accessibility improvements

Benefits

• Competitive compensation including an equity incentive plan (EIP) for all full-time team members
• Tools to thrive - MacBook and other productivity tools
• Support for well-being - 30 vacation days per year, 20 days paid sabbatical every 3 years
• Flexible working hours, free drinks and snacks in offices, regular team events, workations