This is a Design Systems & Operations Lead role within PNC's Treasury Management Digital organisation, based in Pittsburgh PA, Hamilton NJ, or Houston TX. It sits at the intersection of Design Operations, Product Design, and Design Systems, owning the effectiveness of the design delivery system across Research, Experience Design, and Design System teams.
What you'll do
- Own health and effectiveness of the design delivery ecosystem across Research, Experience Design, and Design System teams
- Act as operational connector ensuring the right work reaches the right team with clear goals
- Design and optimise workflows, rituals, and operating models across Design, Product, and Engineering
- Drive operational consistency while maintaining team agility and delivery velocity
- Identify organisational friction points and remove barriers to execution
- Own and evolve intake and work-shaping processes for initiatives
- Partner with leadership on intake management, prioritisation, roadmap alignment, and delivery planning
- Support capacity planning and resource visibility across teams
- Ensure new work enters the system with context, ownership, objectives, and success measures
- Define and maintain stage gates from discovery to delivery closure
- Ensure clear design readiness for development and implementation
- Surface and manage cross-crew dependencies, blockers, and operational risks
- Establish escalation paths and governance mechanisms to maintain delivery flow
- Facilitate critiques, working sessions, alignment forums, and operational reviews
- Create visibility into design duplication, divergence, and delivery bottlenecks
- Define and track design health, delivery, and design system adoption metrics
- Monitor and improve effectiveness of the design delivery system over time
- Govern, champion, and evolve the design system with design leadership
- Co-own the design system roadmap including components, tokens, patterns, templates, assets
- Define governance models and contribution processes for design system enhancements
- Establish inclusion criteria for system components versus custom solutions
- Drive design system adoption as a product and operational discipline
- Partner with product, design, and engineering leaders to align on system usage and standards
- Enable teams through documentation, education, working sessions, and office hours
- Facilitate design system audits and adoption reviews
- Support design-to-development parity throughout the implementation lifecycle
- Partner with engineering to improve design system implementation and scalability
- Lead or support high-impact product initiatives requiring hands-on design involvement
- Maintain direct exposure to product design work to inform operational improvements
- Establish quality benchmarks and best practices through strategic initiatives
- Create and deliver design concepts, workflows, prototypes, and experience solutions
- Partner with product, research, and engineering to align experiences with user needs
- Support user research, usability testing, and iterative design improvements
- Champion accessibility, usability, and responsive design best practices
- Serve as credible design practitioner contributing to and evaluating design work
- Transform complex tasks into intuitive, accessible, easy-to-use designs
- Lead discovery of customer and business needs through contextual inquiries and research
- Set design direction and strategy, leading execution of visual, interaction, and service design
- Communicate initiatives to senior management through user journeys, storyboards, and prototypes
- Set direction for usability of new and existing products
- Establish research methods and strategies, conduct studies, and present findings
- Coach and mentor junior staff and assist in training new staff
What we're looking for
- Advanced Figma systems expertise (components, variants, variables, tokens, libraries)
- Deep experience scaling and governing design systems
- Strong UX and product design fundamentals across the end-to-end product lifecycle
- Proven experience establishing or improving DesignOps functions and operating models
- Understanding of front-end architecture and component-based systems
- Understanding of responsive design and design-to-development workflows
- Experience working within Agile product delivery environments
- Experience supporting cross-functional delivery models at scale
- Accessibility (WCAG) expertise integrated into design practice
- Experience defining metrics and operational measures for design organisations
- Operator mindset, not strategist-only or designer-only
- Systems thinker identifying patterns and addressing root causes
- Organisational and operational leadership skills without direct people management
- Ability to influence peers, leaders, and cross-functional partners
- Bias toward action, simplification, and continuous improvement
- Ability to establish standards and governance without unnecessary bureaucracy
- Strong facilitation and alignment-building capabilities
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and build structure where none exists
- University degree with 5+ years industry-relevant experience
Nice to have
- Storybook and design system tooling ecosystems
- Design maturity assessment and organisational transformation experience
- Process optimisation, service design, or operating model design experience
- Analytics and measurement frameworks for adoption, efficiency, and quality
- High emotional intelligence and organisational awareness
- Coaching and mentorship mindset
- Executive communication and stakeholder management experience
- Change management and organisational design experience
- Agile web development
- Business requirements documentation (BRD)
- Data visualisation
- Digital user experience
- Employee engagement
- IT architecture
- JavaScript
- Wireframing
Good to know
- Based in Pittsburgh PA, Hamilton NJ, or Houston TX
- In-office company
- No visa sponsorship or STEM OPT participation for this position