Design System Lead

The Design System Lead is the principal architect of Pakistan’s national digital UI library. You will treat the PDA Design System not as a static UI kit, but as a living, breathing, standalone product that serves hundreds of internal developers, designers, and external agency partners.

Your mandate is to bridge the gap between design vision and engineering reality. You will ensure that every new government portal can be built rapidly, efficiently, and with strict visual and accessibility consistency. By codifying design decisions into scalable components and design tokens, you will drastically reduce design debt, eliminate redundant engineering work, and ensure that digital equity is built into the foundation of pda.gov.pk.

What You'll Do

• Architect the System: Define the foundational architecture, design tokens, and reusable component library of the PDA Design System across both Figma and front-end code repositories.
• Establish Governance & Contribution: Design and enforce the governance model. Establish clear, frictionless processes for how new UI components are requested by product teams, vetted for WCAG accessibility, built, and merged into the central library.
• Write the Source of Truth: Author comprehensive, highly legible documentation and usage guidelines for both designers and front-end engineers, detailing not just how a component looks, but when and why to use it in a civic context.
• Drive Enterprise Adoption: Act as the chief evangelist for the design system. Partner with engineering directors to drive systemic adoption across disparate government ministries and legacy tech stacks.
• Audit & Enforce: Conduct rigorous audits of internal product outputs and external vendor/agency work to ensure strict, pixel-perfect adherence to the national design language and accessibility standards.

What You Have

• Experience: 5+ years of hybrid experience in UX/UI Design and Front-End Development, with at least 3+ years explicitly dedicated to building, governing, and scaling enterprise-grade design systems.
• Design Tooling Mastery: Expert-level, technical proficiency in Figma (mastery of variables, design tokens, advanced auto-layout, and complex component architecture).
• Technical Fluency: A strong, practical grasp of front-end engineering constraints and frameworks (HTML, CSS, React, or similar). You must be able to confidently review coded components and pair-program with engineers.
• Systems-Level Thinking: A passion for scalable, pixel-perfect architecture. You think in interconnected ecosystems, not isolated screens.