Lead Product Designer - Design System 26

Lead Product Designer - Design System UK / Bulgaria / Malta / South Africa / Spain We believe the next generation of financial services will be powered by stablecoins. Founded in 2021, our mission at BVNK is to accelerate global money movement. We're building stablecoin-native infrastructure so businesses can move value instantly across borders and networks. With global licenses and T1 bank partnerships, we facilitate billions in transactions for enterprise clients like Worldpay, Deel, LianLian Global, and Rapyd. Our technology is transforming how businesses operate globally by eliminating payment delays, reducing costs, and unlocking trapped capital. We're a diverse team spread across EMEA, North America, and APAC, with a shared belief that stablecoins are the new infrastructure layer for financial services, and that BVNK is at the forefront of this shift. In 2025, we secured strategic investment from Visa, following our $50 million Series B with Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Scribble Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Avenir, and Tiger Global. With the backing of these leading investors, we're accelerating our growth and we're looking for smart, ambitious people to help us build the future of financial services. We're incredibly honored to have made Newsweek's list of The Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces three years running (most recently in 2025) and to have been recognised by LinkedIn as one of the Top 20 Startups in the UK in 2024. About this role in the team: Design at BVNK is split into two areas Customer Value Stream and Core Platform. The design system serves both, along with front-end, backend, and the PMs prototyping with it. We're hiring a Lead Product Designer to own it. The system already works. It's built on atomic principles, with React components, Storybook examples, and usage guidance in Zeroheight. The job is to tighten the patterns, improve the documentation, and enable cohesive builds for people who don't need to know what a design system is, including the growing number of designers and PMs building directly in repos with Claude. Designing a system that AI can consume cleanly, so generated work lands close to production instead of drifting, is a meaningful part of this. You'll sit in the Core Platform pod and report to the Head of Design, pairing with Principal Designer - Core Platform and Principal Front-end engineers on the strategic direction of the system. The system supports around fifty people across design, front-end, backend, and product. The work is to scale the system and advocate for it across the org as the consumer base grows. Key Areas of Responsibilities: Own the design system end-to-end • Set and ship the roadmap. Decide what to build, what to deprecate, what to leave alone, and what to invest in next • Keep the FigmaStorybookZeroheight stack tight. One source of truth per concept, clear documentation, no duplication • Partner with front-end on contribution flows, component APIs, and the design-to-code handshake. • Read and reason about the component code, not just the designs. You don't need to ship production React, but you should be able to look at a component's implementation, understand its props and composition, and have credible conversations with front-end about tradeoffs • Run the unglamorous governance work audits, deprecations, docs hygiene, naming alongside the new-component work Design a system that AI can consume cleanly • Build the system so LLMs and AI prototyping tools generate against it with minimal drift. Component naming, prop structure, usage docs, and examples should all be readable by humans and by models • Use AI in your own workflow to audit existing patterns, draft component documentation, scaffold new components, and pressure-test API design • Treat the PMs prototyping with AI as a real user group. Their drift is your signal • Share what works. The wider design and product org should benefit from what you learn about AI-friendly system design Work AI-first, not AI-curious • Start in an LLM. Use Claude to clarify intent, draft short PRDs, pressure-test approaches, and surface risks and second-order effects before involving the wider team • Prototype with Claude Code. Generate working components and patterns, then guide them on structure, behaviour, and quality • Treat AI as a velocity tool across the work not a novelty, not a side project • Create new Claude plugins and Skills to keep design prompts consistent Sell the system's value, in the open • Articulate the system's impact in metrics, not vibes: adoption, contribution rates, time-to-ship for product teams, prototype-to-production drift, consistency across surfaces • Make the work visible. Demo it, write about it, share patterns and decisions with designers, engineers, and PMs • Run crits and reviews around system changes. Mentor designers contributing to the system. Help front-end and PMs become better consumers of it • Build the case for further investment in the system as it grows What we need from you: • Experience shipping and governing a design system in production, used by multiple product teams. Not a side project, not a one-off rebuild • Senior craft across Figma, tokens, component architecture, and the design-engineering handshake. • Working technical literacy in HTML, CSS, and React/TypeScript. You can read component code fluently, understand prop APIs and composition patterns, and reason about implementation tradeoffs with front-end engineers. You don't need to ship production code, but you should be able to prototype in it • Evidence of running a real roadmap for a system deciding what to build, what to depreca.