Principal Product Designer - Design Systems

Twinkl is hiring a Principal Product Designer to own the direction of its design system that spans customer-facing and B2B products across web and mobile. The role is a hands-on individual contributor position, permanent/full-time (37.5 hours, core hours 10:00-14:00 Monday-Friday) and is remote in the UK. The designer will define the system's scope and governance, build parts of the system, enable adoption across teams, and mentor colleagues.

• Define what the design system is for, what it covers and where it stops, and translate that into design principles and a roadmap.
• Establish governance for the system: how a component is proposed, reviewed, versioned, deprecated and documented, and who decides; own review gates.
• Design and ship the system hands-on, including components, composed modules and page templates for the range of states, breakpoints, themes and content.
• Own the token layer from foundations through to semantic tokens and resolve intricate edge cases.
• Work alongside engineering on the coded implementation so design and code remain one system; run contribution and office-hours forums and write guidance to drive adoption.
• Anticipate dependencies across product, engineering and platform work that affect releases.
• Build WCAG 2.2 AA conformance into components and challenge design/technical assumptions that would exclude educators or learners.
• Partner with UXR and customer insights to turn user behaviour into system-level decisions, information architecture and patterns.

• Be systems-minded: see the pattern behind requests and judge when to solve once for everyone versus locally.
• Demonstrate strong leadership: set direction and lift standards across product areas without formal authority.
• Communicate effectively and collaboratively to explain complex system decisions and trade-offs to designers, engineers, product managers and senior stakeholders.
• Be detail-oriented: hold a very high bar on craft, naming, documentation and consistency.
• Manage projects efficiently: run system work alongside product delivery and estimate honestly.
• Be adaptable and have a growth mindset.
• At least 3 years defining, setting and governing a design system, including scope, principles, contribution and review model, versioning and deprecation.
• 5+ years hands-on delivery of design system components, modules and templates in production and in use by other teams.