Design System Manager (with AI Capabilities) (F/M)

  • Permanent Contract
  • Full-time
  • At least 5 years of experience (Senior level)
  • Master degree
  • Digital

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


About the role

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.

Profile

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.
  • 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).

Skills

DIGITAL PRODUCT DESIGN
FIGMA
DESIGN SYSTEM
UI DESIGN
DESIGN TOKENS
WEB
APP
ACCESSIBILITY
BRAND SYSTEM
MOTION
MICRO-INTERACTIONS

Equal opportunities

At Lacoste, we are committed to making equal opportunities a reality. Inherited from our unique vision of fashion-sport, equal opportunities move us forward and our recruitment methods follow this commitment by focusing on skills and embracing all types of talents. We commit to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment where elegance goes beyond style and where each of us is given the chance to fulfill our greatest potential.