Design System Lead

Title: Design System Lead
Location: Vienna, VA, Pensacola, FL, or Winchester, VA (HYBRID)
Duration: Initial 6-month contract with possible extensions
Compensation: $40/hour - $45/hour
Work Requirements: US Citizen, GC Holders or Authorized to Work in the U.S.

Design System Lead
The Platform Design Systems Lead curates and advances the design-system experience for a specific product platform, ensuring that platform-level patterns, components, design tokens, documentation, and implementation guidance align with CMD+R and broader enterprise design-system direction. This role bridges design, engineering, product, accessibility, and leadership within the platform to keep experiences usable, scalable, accessible, and consistent.

This role does not own or lead the full enterprise design system. Instead, it operates as the platform-level design-system lead and partner to the hybrid enterprise design-system model, helping translate CMD+R standards into practical platform adoption, implementation, documentation, and governance practices.

The role requires enough front-end technical fluency to understand implementation feasibility, identify technical gaps, guide handoff practices, and collaborate effectively with engineering partners. While hands-on web development experience remains valuable, the primary emphasis is on platform leadership, CI/CD and release-process awareness, documentation, adoption, governance, and cross-functional enablement rather than day-to-day component coding.

Basic Purpose
The Platform Design Systems Lead is responsible for the strategic development, governance, and adoption of design-system practices for an assigned platform, ensuring platform-specific design tokens, components, patterns, and documentation stay aligned with CMD+R and related enterprise guidance. The role enables scalable, consistent, and accessible digital experiences across the platform by fostering shared patterns, reusable guidance, contribution discipline, and sustainable design-to-development workflows.

This role partners closely with designers, developers, product teams, accessibility stakeholders, enterprise design-system partners, and leadership to translate platform needs into practical technical and process improvements. The ideal candidate can recognize gaps in component implementation, token usage, documentation, release readiness, and CI/CD workflows, then collaborate with cross-functional partners to improve quality, consistency, and speed to delivery within the platform.

Key Responsibilities:
Platform Strategy & Leadership

• Define and evolve the platform design-system roadmap in alignment with product goals, platform priorities, accessibility expectations, and CMD+R enterprise guidance.
• Champion design-system adoption within the assigned platform, driving consistent use of approved patterns, tokens, components, documentation, and contribution practices.
• Represent platform needs, constraints, and feedback in design-system conversations, helping ensure CMD+R guidance can be translated into practical platform implementation.
• Provide leadership-level recommendations on platform design-system priorities, risks, technical gaps, adoption barriers, and opportunities to improve delivery workflows.

Collaboration & Governance

• Partner with platform design, engineering, product, accessibility, and enterprise design-system stakeholders to ensure platform solutions meet user, business, accessibility, and implementation needs.
• Maintain platform-level governance models, contribution workflows, intake practices, decision criteria, and scalable processes that complement CMD+R rather than duplicate or replace it.
• Facilitate conversations between designers, developers, and leadership to align expectations, clarify ownership, and improve end-to-end design-to-development handoff within the platform.
• Escalate cross-platform or enterprise-impacting questions to the appropriate CMD+R or enterprise design-system partners for alignment and decision support.

Technical Enablement & Engineering Partnership

• Apply working knowledge of front-end technologies to evaluate implementation feasibility, review platform design-system technical needs, and support effective collaboration with engineering partners.
• Partner with front-end engineers to ensure platform patterns, tokens, and components are implementable, accessible, performant, reusable, and aligned with CMD+R standards and platform realities.
• Support CI/CD and release-process improvements for platform design-system assets by collaborating on build, test, documentation, versioning, dependency management, and deployment workflows.
• Identify technical gaps in platform component libraries, token pipelines, documentation, and handoff practices; recommend practical improvements that support designers and engineers.
• Translate design-system patterns and tokens into platform implementation guidance, examples, or lightweight prototypes as needed, using modern front-end concepts without making hands-on feature development the…