Lead Design Systems Engineer

About Whitespace

Whitespace is at the forefront of engineering intelligent, secure AI solutions for the enterprise. While AI offers transformative potential, many organisations find it challenging to unlock its true value. We address this challenge through Collective—the AI Operating System designed for high‑assurance environments. It is engineered for scalability, trust, and decisive action, even within highly secure, complex, or air‑gapped infrastructures. Our mission extends beyond building systems;

we are establishing the framework for a future defined by seamless human‑machine collaboration.

Department: Engineering

Location: Belfast (Hybrid)

Hours: Full time

Closing date: Open until filled

As a Lead Design Systems Engineer, you will be the critical bridge between design and engineering — ensuring that every component we build is a pixel‑perfect implementation of the storybook created by our designers. You will own the front end execution of our component library, working closely with the design team to translate their storybook into production‑ready react components. This is a high‑impact role for someone with a sharp eye for detail, a deep respect for design intent, and the front‑end expertise to bring it to life without compromise.

Critically, you will ensure that the components you build are adopted consistently across all of Whitespace's applications — so that every product we ship looks and feels the same.

• Build and maintain accessible, production‑ready components that precisely match the Storybook specifications created by our design team.
• Review Storybook stories written by designers and translate them into clean, well‑structured React component APIs that are flexible yet consistent.
• Own the versioning and release process for the component library, ensuring changes are backward‑compatible and well‑communicated to consuming teams.
• Write visual regression tests to catch any deviation from the designer‑approved Storybook across every release.
• Champion visual consistency across all Whitespace applications by owning the design system end‑to‑end — from individual Storybook‑aligned components to common UI patterns and templates such as the shell UI, notification drawers, and navigation structures — ensuring every product team builds on the same foundation for a unified look and feel across the company's suite of products.

• Consume the design token pipeline — typography, colour, spacing, and motion — and apply tokens precisely so that production components match the Storybook at a pixel level.
• Work in close partnership with designers to review Storybook specifications before implementation and raise any ambiguities or feasibility concerns early.
• Evaluate and maintain tooling that bridges Storybook and production code, such as style‑dictionary or similar token pipelines, to keep design and engineering in sync.

• Ensure every component implemented from Storybook meets WCAG accessibility standards, treating accessibility as a non‑negotiable part of design fidelity.
• Conduct regular accessibility audits of implemented components and flag any deviations from Storybook specs.
• Act as an internal advocate for accessibility, helping product engineers understand and apply the accessible patterns defined in the Storybook.

• Maintain implementation‑focused documentation and code examples alongside storybook stories, so engineers can confidently adopt components without hand‑holding.
• Design system evangelism — owning adoption across both core and solutions engineering teams, proactively promoting best practices while being responsive to team needs and feedback.
• Feed into the component roadmap by identifying gaps between the existing storybook and what has been implemented, prioritising work to close those gaps.
• Gather feedback from engineers about implementation pain points and feed those insights back to the design team to improve future Storybook specs.

• Actively participate in sprint planning, stand‑ups, and retrospectives, bringing the design‑to‑engineering fidelity perspective to every…