Director, Design System & Foundations

At Constant Contact, we are seriously awesome people who take ownership and make an impact by operating with the mindset, integrity and courage of a small business owner. There’s something so profoundly rewarding about knowing that your work is empowering people everywhere to pursue their dreams. Here, we all play an integral part in helping business owners, entrepreneurs, non‑profits and individuals to succeed by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online.

We’re energized by new challenges and new possibilities—and we’re just getting started!

We empower millions of small businesses to grow their brand and succeed through powerful digital marketing tools. Our Design System is the engine that drives a cohesive, intuitive, and accessible experience across all our product lines (Email Marketing, Websites, Social, and CRM). Join us in scaling our design practice and enabling thousands of developers and designers to build products faster and more consistently.

The Director, Design System & Foundations is a highly strategic leadership role, serving as the connective tissue between design, product, and engineering. You will own the long‑term vision and strategic roadmap for our unified system, ensuring it is built on mobile‑first principles and drives measurable efficiency across the entire organization. You will manage a cross‑functional team and act as the primary governance leader, translating high‑level design strategy into scalable operational practices that define the future look and feel of Constant Contact’s product suite.

• Strategy & Roadmap Ownership: Define and champion the long‑term strategic vision and prioritized roadmap for the Design System, integrating mobile‑first design principles and future‑forward design strategy into all major initiatives.
• Experience Standards & Governance:
  • Define and govern the core standards for the Constant Contact product experience, ensuring alignment across UX, visual design, branding, and content strategy with a mobile‑first approach.
  • Collaborate closely with the Brand team to translate corporate identity guidelines into scalable, reusable patterns and tokens within the product experience.
  • Partner with the content strategist to define and integrate foundational rules for product voice, tone, and messaging consistency into the system's guidelines.
• People & Team Leadership: Manage, mentor, and grow the dedicated team responsible for system components and foundations, with a specific focus on Visual Designers, UX Designers, and Content Strategists. Foster a culture of systems thinking, craft excellence, and cross‑discipline collaboration within the team.
• Quality & Accessibility: Own the quality of system output, enforcing best practices, ensuring all components adhere to WCAG AA accessibility standards, and driving visual and technical consistency across all platforms.
• Cross‑Functional Partnership: Act as the primary liaison between Product Leadership, Design Leadership, and Engineering/Platform teams, driving system adoption metrics and ensuring the correct translation of design standards into code.
• Process Improvement: Drive continuous improvement in our design‑to‑code workflow, tooling, and release process to maximize team velocity and reduce design debt.

• Experience & Leadership: 5+ years of professional experience in Product Design, UX Engineering, or Design Systems, with 2+ years in a people management or dedicated systems leadership role for a mature product organization.
• Creative Foundation Expertise: Proven experience defining and scaling foundational standards for product experiences, specifically encompassing Visual Design principles, Brand consistency, and UX Content Strategy (e.g., voice and tone guidelines).
• Design Tool Mastery: Expert proficiency in modern design tools (Figma is essential), including building, structuring, and maintaining scalable component libraries, component variants, and design tokens that serve as the single source of truth.
• Quality & Accessibility: Deep, practical understanding of web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1+ AA) and demonstrated experience embedding inclusive design…