Design Lead, Design Systems

Softline Solutions is a full-service digital marketing agency based in Southern California that helps businesses grow online by increasing visibility, generating leads, and boosting sales. They build tailored, data-driven campaigns across key digital channels and manage everything from strategy to execution and reporting. The goal is measurable growth, not buzzwords.

You'll own the design system and produce the work that proves what it's capable of. As our Design Lead, Design Systems, you're responsible for the design system infrastructure across Closet by Design, Closet World, and Brio Water, and for the executional design work that sets the quality benchmark every team can see, build from, and ship. This isn't a role where systems thinking exists in isolation from craft, or where craft stops at the Figma file.

You'll think in systems, execute at a high level, and work closely with engineering to make sure quality follows the design all the way out the door.

• Build, maintain, and evolve a unified but brand-flexible design system, components, tokens, guidelines, and documentation, that serves all three UX product teams
• Audit the current design state across brands, identify system gaps and inconsistencies, and create a roadmap to close them
• Define component architecture, versioning, contribution workflows, and governance processes so the system scales as the team and products grow
• Establish system architecture that supports speed without sacrificing consistency, so teams can move quickly without drifting from the standards

• Produce polished, high-fidelity visual work across all three brands, both production-ready assets and forward-looking concept work that shows the team where the bar is
• Lead the visual design execution for Closet World, bringing the craft and vision to elevate the brand's digital experience and build the foundation the rest of the team can reference and grow from
• Create the kind of work that sets the benchmark, not to keep it to yourself, but to show the team what excellent looks like and make it the new normal

• Develop future-state design concepts and explorations that show what each brand experience can become, not just what it is today
• Challenge assumptions in the current experience; bring fresh eyes, strong conviction, and the craft to back it up
• Keep the team and leadership aligned on where design is headed, not just where it currently stands

• Work closely with engineering to ensure that what gets designed gets built right, own the design-to-dev handoff with care, precision, and a clear quality standard
• Maintain spec fidelity through implementation; be the design voice in the build, not just the file, review shipped work and close quality gaps directly
• Build and refine token pipelines and handoff documentation that make it easy for engineers to implement components correctly the first time
• Foster a strong design-engineering relationship, the kind where both sides understand each other's constraints and the shipped product reflects the intended design

• Partner closely with UX designers embedded across each brand to ensure system adoption is real and the work is strong, not just documented
• Provide design direction, feedback, and executional support to elevate the output of the broader team
• Make it easy for designers to use the system well, through clear documentation, reusable templates, and regular hands-on collaboration

• Work in Figma and across the best available tooling to iterate at the speed the business requires
• Balance fast-turn requests from brand teams with long-term system integrity, know when to move and when to hold the standard
• Operate with ownership and autonomy, you don't wait to be told what needs improving

• 8+ years of design experience, with at least 3 years in a lead or senior IC role with direct design system ownership
• A portfolio that demonstrates both strong design system work and strong visual design execution, you need to show us you can do both, not just one
• Experience working across multiple brands or products simultaneously, with a track record of maintaining system coherence across varied contexts
• E-commerce, consumer products, or DTC background strongly preferred
• Deep proficiency in Figma, variables, tokens, auto-layout, component…