Design Systems Lead
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
As our Design Systems Lead, you will be the architect of our UI's "Source of Truth." You will move beyond visual mocks to define the behaviour, semantics, and logic that allow our engineers, and our AI-driven development tools like Cursor, to build with speed and stability. You will ensure that as we scale to meet the needs of the world's largest enterprises, our product remains compliant with global regulations like EAA 2026, and accessible to every user, regardless of how they interact with their screen., * Own the Semantic System: Move beyond visuals to define keyboard flows, focus orders, and ARIA semantics that engineers can't reliably infer from mocks alone.
- Bridge Design & Code: Maintain a tight loop between Figma and React, ensuring our design tokens and components are robust and accessible by default.
- Future-Proof for AI: Stabilise our component architecture to unlock the full potential of LLM-driven development, providing the high-quality context that AI tools need to be productive.
- Set Accessibility Policy: Define the "Definition of Done" for accessibility across the product, running assistive-tech tests and making critical UX trade-offs such as captioning UX, and audio descriptions to prevent costly engineering rework.
- Enable the Product Team: Act as a force multiplier for our product designers and engineers, providing them with the tools and patterns to ship complex features without compromising on consistency or compliance., At Synthesia we're passionate about building, not talking, planning or politicising. We strive to hire the smartest, kindest and most unrelenting people and let them do their best work without distractions. Our work principles serve as our charter for how we make decisions, give feedback and structure our work to empower everyone to go as fast as possible. You can find out more about these principles here.
Requirements
Do you have experience in SaaS?, * Significant experience building and scaling Design Systems for complex SaaS web apps.
- Deep Accessibility Expertise and a firm understanding of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) requirements.
- Technical fluency meaning you are as comfortable discussing React component logic as you are in Figma. You understand how design tokens and CSS variables impact engineering velocity.
- Systems Thinking and the ability to see the "lego blocks" within a complex video editor and standardise them into reusable, stable patterns.
- Strategic Opinion with Strong views on when to use "standard" vs. "custom" UI and the ability to articulate the ROI of accessibility to both Product and Engineering leadership.
- Communication Skills that enable you to document complex behaviours clearly so they can be parsed by both human developers and LLMs.
Benefits & conditions
You will be compensated well with a generous salary and equity.
Flexible, hybrid role based of our London office.
You get 25 days of annual leave + local holidays.
Regular team offsites where you'll get to collaborate with the product & engineering team in person.
Work from home budget
Work from anywhere policy of 60 days per year
You will join an established company culture with regular socials.
You can participate in a generous referral scheme.
Huge opportunity for a career defining role as we go from a series D scale-up with strong PMF to the next phase of growth.