Pennylane is hiring a Design System Designer to grow and maintain Purse, its design system, working alongside the Design System Manager. The role owns the craft of the system at component level, building tokens, components and patterns used by 40+ designers and engineers across web, mobile and tablet.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain components, patterns and tokens in Purse
- Partner with engineering to ensure design-code parity across web, mobile and tablet
- Write and maintain component documentation for designers, engineers and AI tools, including usage rules, anatomy, variants and accessibility
- Run audits, support product designers and turn recurring needs into systemic improvements
- Work with the Design System Manager to evolve Purse toward its long-term vision through incremental milestones
What we're looking for
- Hands-on experience contributing to a design system at scale: components, variants, APIs, tokens, Figma libraries for 40+ designers
- Strong understanding of design token systems, semantic naming and theming / multi-brand patterns
- Skilled at running design system audits and spotting inconsistencies in product surfaces
- Experience writing component documentation clear for designers, engineers and product managers
- Expertise in making design systems interpretable by AI: structured content, machine-readable patterns, AI-ready documentation
- Solid grounding in accessibility (WCAG) and inclusive design practices
- Ability to slice an ambitious vision into small, value-delivering milestones
- Pragmatic mindset, knowing when 'good enough' beats perfect
- Curiosity about how design systems are evolving (AI, codegen, token automation, MCP)
- Comfort switching between deep craft work and pragmatic system-level decisions
- Strong technical acumen with clear understanding of how design systems are implemented in code
- Comfortable working in a production-first environment where code is the source of truth
- Experience partnering with engineering teams for design-code parity and smooth implementation
- Experience supporting product designers through office hours, a support model or peer review
- Demonstrated ability to evangelize a design system and present design rationale to stakeholders
- Ability to handle complex support requests and turn recurring questions into permanent improvements
Nice to have
- Experience with B2B SaaS products or fintech environments
- Familiarity with multi-language / internationalization design challenges
- Experience contributing to or maintaining a tokens pipeline (Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio, MCP-based pipelines)
- Background in accessibility standards and inclusive design practices
- Experience working in fast-growing scale-ups
Good to know
- Must communicate well in both English and French
- Remote work allowed from country of residence within Europe, max two-hour time difference from CET
- French contract following French regulation if based in France