Design System Leader blending UX/UI rigor with AI-powered automation

Your Responsibilities:

1. Lead, Scale & Govern the Design System

• Define and drive the Design System strategy, roadmap, and governance.
• Ensure the evolution, quality, and maintainability of components, tokens, and interaction patterns.
• Guarantee coherence and accessibility across all product surfaces (WCAG AA).

2. Drive Adoption Across Product, Design & Engineering

• Partner with Product Designers, Design Lead, and Tech lead to ensure end-to-end parity between design & code.
• Support teams during discovery: consulting, interface audits, component recommendations.

• Integrate the Design System into product workflows (Jira, dev pipelines, rituals, design reviews).

3. Manage Quality, Accessibility & Performance

• Establish quality standards, contribution processes, and acceptance criteria.
• Lead design reviews on high-impact journeys, scalability issues, and edge cases.
• Track key metrics: adoption, consistency, design debt, delivery speed.

4. Documentation, Enablement & Evangelization

• Deliver actionable, concise documentation (guidelines, do/don't, code examples, ...).
• Lead onboarding, workshops, and learning programs for designers and engineers.
• Animate the internal Design System community (demos, newsletters, rituals).

5. AI, Automation & Future-Proofing the System

You will be a key driver of AI-enhanced workflows to make teams faster and more efficient:

• Explore and deploy AI-powered tooling or Vibe coding plugins (component generation, documentation automation, pattern detection, UI cleanup, …).
• Identify opportunities to automate manual tasks (audit reports, change logs, guidelines updates, asset generation).
• Experiment with emerging technologies (semantic search, design QA automation, LLM-based component mapping).
• Evaluate and integrate AI solutions into DS governance to ensure scalability and durability.

Daily Workflow (Simplified):

• Discovery: DS consulting, scoping new components, early alignment with feature teams.
• Delivery: managing Figma libraries, ensuring design-code handover, documenting patterns.
• Run: handling requests, prioritizing DS backlog, maintaining governance & metrics.

Your Environment:

• Design: Figma (tokens, variables, branching, variants, auto-layout)
• Engineering: Storybook, UI libraries, design tokens pipelines
• Culture: accessibility-first, cross-functional collaboration, AI-assisted workflows

What You Bring:

• Proven experience managing or scaling a Design System at product/organization level.
• Strong foundations in UX/UI, systems thinking, accessibility, and component architecture.
• Leadership and facilitation skills to align diverse stakeholders.
• Curiosity and drive to leverage AI as a force multiplier for design & product delivery.

About the Role

As the Design System Manager, you will own the vision, strategy, and execution of the Lacoste Design System

Required Skills:

Must-have

• 3-5 years of experience in Product Design / UI, including 2+ years working on a Design System at scale.
• Advanced Figma skills (variables, tokens, component properties, variants, libraries, prototyping).
• Solid understanding of design tokens (structure, theming, multi-platform) and code-side UI libraries (Storybook, React / React Native / SwiftUI - ability to read and collaborate with developers).
• Good foundations in Front-end (HTML/CSS, TypeScript) or Mobile (iOS/Android) to ensure strong design-code parity.
• Strong accessibility culture (WCAG AA) and experience with responsive/adaptive interfaces.
• Excellent documentation skills (clarity, concision, concrete examples) and a strong ability to explain and teach.
• A strategic vision of design and the ability to rally teams around a transversal, structuring initiative.
• Professional French; working proficiency in English (written and spoken) in an international environment.

Nice-to-have

• Experience with brand systems.
• Skills in motion and micro-interactions (Lottie, Jitter, ProtoPie).