Leads the Design Systems team within Clio's R&D Design pillar, owning the system's operating model: roadmap, intake, contribution, governance, versioning, and health metrics. Also oversees onboarding and product-led growth patterns, reporting to the Platform Product Design Director.
What you'll do
- Own how the system runs: roadmap, intake, contribution/review rules, versioning, health metrics
- Lead the shift from a browsable library to a machine-readable source of truth for people and agents
- Bring shared interaction models from Grow, Manage, Work and Enterprise teams into the system, including data viz and conversational UI patterns
- Extend the system and its governance across web, mobile and desktop apps
- Work with Brand and Marketing on brand expression and theming, including Enterprise white-label
- Work directly with Platform Engineering on token pipelines, component APIs and design-code parity
- Oversee reusable onboarding, trial, upgrade and contextual-growth patterns with PLG/Growth leads
- Align system roadmap with accessibility conformance and international launch timelines
- Build discovery and validation into how patterns get made, and track their production performance
- Hire, coach and grow the team; run critiques, design reviews and discovery workshops
- Use AI in your own work and show the team how to use it
What we're looking for
- 10+ years of product design experience, including Staff, Principal or Lead level
- 2+ years managing designers or formally leading a design systems team
- Track record building and running a design system at scale, including governance, contribution and versioning
- Strong UX and visual craft, with deep knowledge of interaction design, IA and accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)
- Technical fluency with design tokens, component architecture and front-end code
- Real working relationship with platform engineers
- Experience working with Brand and Marketing on brand expression, theming or multi-brand systems
- Experience designing AI-powered experiences, including patterns for trust, transparency and control
- Strong product judgment connecting system investments to customer and business outcomes
- Fluency with modern design, prototyping and AI tools (e.g. Claude, Figma, Cursor)
- Facilitation skills aligning Product, Engineering and Design peers through ambiguity
- Experience making a design system machine-readable, with structured specs and tokens as data
- Shipped patterns for AI-native experiences: streaming states, citations, confidence signals, error recovery
- Experience with localization-ready systems across web, mobile and desktop
- Experience designing or overseeing onboarding, trial and upgrade patterns in a PLG motion
Nice to have
- Background in content design or writing voice and tone standards at the system level
- Experience delivering accessibility conformance through a design system
- Experience bringing acquired products onto a shared system
Good to know
- Open to candidates across Canada (excluding Quebec) and the US
- Hybrid: in office at least twice a week on Anchor Days if near a hub (Burnaby, Calgary, Toronto)
- Reports to the Platform Product Design Director
- Manages a team of Design Systems and PLG designers
- This role is a backfill for an existing position
