Designer Lead Senior - Design Systems

Position: Experience Designer Lead Senior - Design Systems
** Position Overview*
* At PNC, our people are our greatest differentiator and competitive advantage in the markets we serve. We are all united in delivering the best experience for our customers. We work together each day to foster an inclusive workplace culture where all of our employees feel respected, valued and have an opportunity to contribute to the company's success. As an Experience Designer Lead Senior within PNC's Digital organization, you will be based in Pittsburgh, PA.

As an Experience Designer Lead Senior on the Design Systems team, you will serve as an individual contributor who provides daily direction, orchestration, and mentorship to a pod of designers maintaining and evolving PNC's largest and most mature design systems. This role combines deep subject matter expertise in design systems with hands-on leadership to improve consistency, scalability, efficiency, and quality across PNC's core digital experiences.

You will drive alignment across product design teams, steward governance practices, and guide the creation and adoption of reusable patterns across Figma, code libraries, and supporting documentation.

Key Responsibilities

- Provide daily direction, mentoring, and work orchestration for a pod of eight designers contributing to multiple enterprise design systems

- Lead the evolution of design system libraries, including Figma components and design foundations / tokens, coded component libraries, and supporting documentation

- Drive design system strategy, roadmap, and discovery work, incorporating customer feedback, competitive analysis, and emerging industry trends including exploration of AI-powered workflows and ensuring AI-generated experiences align with design system standards.

- Oversee and facilitate design system governance, including steering committees, design reviews, cross-team alignment sessions, and the evolution of contribution models

- Define and drive alignment to design system standards, patterns, principles, and accessibility requirements

- Coordinate with engineering and accessibility partners to ensure design-to-development collaboration in compliance with standards

- Drive and enable adoption and measure design system effectiveness across teams leveraging office hours, AMAs, and help desk support, serving a broad community of product designers

- Lead and contribute to design reviews and audits to promote consistency and identify opportunities for system improvements

- Facilitate cross-team collaboration and working sessions to connect design efforts and scale system usage across products

PNC is an in-office company that fosters a supportive culture where employees can thrive and achieve balance. We encourage candidates to connect with their recruiter and hiring manager to understand workplace expectations and ensure the role aligns with their goals.

PNC will not provide sponsorship for employment visas or participate in STEM OPT for this position.

** Job Description*
* + Influences the process and transforms most complex tasks into intuitive, accessible and easy-to-use designs through the entire experience lifecycle, from the first-time user to the expert.

+ Develops and recommends the discovery techniques of customer and business needs through contextual inquiries, and generative and quantitative research. Uncovers customer latent needs and creates vision to meet those needs.

+ Drives and establishes the design direction and strategy. Leads others to execute visual, information, interaction and service design elements of the initiative that meets business and customer needs and delights customers. Communicates the initiative and product to others, including senior management, through user journeys, storyboards, prototypes, wireframes and other materials.

+ Sets the direction for usability of new and existing products, makes adjustments to align with shifting customer expectations.

+ Develops research methods and strategies, conduct studies, and present findings that will inform improvements in the customer experience.

+ Coaches and mentors junior staff;
Assists management team in training new staff.

PNC Employees take pride in our reputation and to continue building upon that we expect our employees to be:

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** Customer Focused**  - Knowledgeable of the values and practices that align customer needs and satisfaction as primary considerations in all business decisions and able to leverage that information in creating customized customer solutions.

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** Managing Risk**  - Assessing and effectively managing all of the risks associated with their business objectives and activities to ensure they adhere to and support PNC's Enterprise Risk Management Framework.

** Qualifications*
* Successful candidates must demonstrate appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities for a role. Listed below are skills, competencies, work experience, education, and required certifications/licensures needed to be successful in this position.

** Preferred Skills*
* Agile Web Development, Business Requirements…