Lead Product Designer, Design Systems

Job Description:

Lead Product Designer - Design Systems

Bupa Place, Manchester / Angel Court, London - hybrid 2 days in office

Permanent

Full time

Salary £62100 - £77600 depending on experience + Management Bonus

We consider all types of flexibility wherever possible, including locations, hours and working patterns.

We make health happen

The role

You'll lead the evolution of Bupa's design system as a strategic enabler of product and design delivery at a senior level. You'll drive coherence, accessibility, and scalability across our digital experiences-partnering closely with design, engineering, and product teams to ensure the system is robust, inclusive, and future-ready.

Key objectives

• Define, own, and evolve the design system's architecture, taxonomy, principles, and governance, ensuring it scales across products, platforms, and teams.
• Champion organisation‑wide consistency, accessibility, and usability, acting as the primary custodian of quality and coherence.
• Serve as a strategic partner to product, engineering, brand, and accessibility teams-driving cross-discipline alignment, adoption, and cross‑functional decision‑making.
• Shape the long‑term vision and roadmap for the design system, ensuring it continues to meet real‑world delivery needs and future business ambitions.

How you'll help us make health happen

System Leadership

• Own the end‑to‑end architecture of the design system, including tokens, components, guidelines, and the relationships between them.

• Lead and chair cross‑functional working groups, ensuring engineering, product, brand, and content perspectives are represented in system evolution.
• Set and enforce the design principles, standards, and patterns that underpin Bupa's digital experiences.
• Ensure accessibility, responsiveness, scalability, and performance are embedded at a structural level-not just component level.

Collaboration & Advocacy

• Partner with engineering leadership to drive code-design alignment, shared contribution processes, and scalable implementation practices.
• Work with product leadership to ensure system evolution directly supports squad roadmaps and organisational priorities.
• Act as the primary evangelist for the design system-leading demos, building momentum, delivering training, and socialising new capabilities across the business.
• Influence senior stakeholders, helping them understand the system's value, opportunities, and operational impact.

Documentation & Governance

• Set and manage the governance model, contribution workflows, approval processes, and release approach.
• Ensure documentation in Zeroheight and Figma meets publication‑quality standards, providing clarity, discoverability, and instructional value.
• Align the system to brand, tone of voice, experience principles, and accessibility requirements, ensuring coherence across all touchpoints.

Measurement & Impact

• Define and track success measures for the design system, including adoption, system health, contribution activity, quality indicators, and sentiment.
• Use metrics, feedback loops, and delivery data to shape the roadmap, identify gaps, and proactively address areas for improvement.
• Communicate impact to stakeholders, demonstrating how the design system drives efficiency, consistency, and quality at scale.

You

• Deep expertise in design systems architecture, scalable component libraries, and multi‑platform design tooling.
• Advanced technical Figma capability, including components, variants, tokens, and system-level design.
• Strong understanding of governance, contribution models, and cross‑disciplinary collaboration.
• Experience influencing or partnering with senior stakeholders across design, engineering, and product.
• Proven ability to operate in scaled agile environments and navigate organisational complexity.
• Familiarity with Zeroheight, Storybook, and related tooling used in documentation and implementation pipelines.
• Experience working within healthcare, insurance, or other regulated industries (highly desirable).
• Solid understanding of front‑end development concepts, implementation constraints, and design-engineering workflows.
• Clear evidence of leading organisations through systemic design change, not just component delivery.
• Naturally strategic, comfortable owning vision, driving alignment, and making decisions with organisation‑wide impact.

Benefits

Our benefits are designed to make health happen for our people. Viva is our global wellbeing programme and includes all aspects of our health - from mental and physical, to financial, social and environmental wellbeing. We support flexible working and have a range of family friendly benefits.

You'll receive the following benefits and more:

• 25 days holiday pro rata, increasing through length of service, with option to buy or sell.
• Private Medical Health Insurance as a benefit in kind
• An enhanced pension plan and life insurance
• Various other benefits and online discounts

Why Bupa?

We're a health insurer and provider. With no shareholders, our customers are our focus. Our people are all driven by the same purpose - helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives and making a better world. We make health happen by being brave, caring and responsible in everything we do.

We encourage all of our people to ”Be you at Bupa”, we champion diversity, and we understand the importance of our people representing the communities and customers we serve. That's why we especially encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Bupa is a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer. This means we aim to offer an interview/assessment to every disabled applicant who meets the minimum criteria for the role. We'll make sure you are treated fairly and offer reasonable adjustments as part of our recruitment process to anyone that needs them.

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