Senior Design Systems Designer

About Us Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we're on a mission to power real work, with real impact. We're trusted by more than 12,000 companies worldwide, including Bolt, GoCardless, and Fabletics, and we're tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem https://www.perk.com/shadow-work-report. Founded in 2015, Perk has grown into a global company of more than 1,800 people across 12 offices globally, with headquarters in London and Boston. We combine innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work and how people feel at work. At Perk, we're driven by our values, like being an owner, delivering a 7-star experience, and working as one team. We value curiosity, purpose, and mindset, not just knowledge, to unlock the power in your potential. Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel, fintech, and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. If you're excited about having a real impact and shaping how millions of people experience work, we'd love you on the team. Visit www.perk.com http://www.perk.com to learn more. What you'll do Suitcase is Perk's design system, supporting 25+ designers and the engineers who build with them across web and mobile. Our ambition is for it to be a complete, consumer-grade, accessible and distributable system, so Perk feels like one consistent product on every surface our customers use, including AI agents and assistants. As a Senior Design Systems Designer you'll own the craft and visual direction of Suitcase, and work with front-end engineers, content designers and product designers to make high quality design the default standard. You will: - Set the direction for Suitcase with design and engineering leadership, turn the vision into a roadmap with named resources, and report progress against it. - Own the visual language, token architecture, and foundations of Suitcase: typography, colour, space, motion, and interaction states. - Work with content design and localisation on content tokens, so components carry their language requirements. - Design, document, and refine components with complete states, variants, platform coverage and usage guidance. - Write component specs that AI prototyping tools can read, so generated prototypes use real Suitcase components and tokens. - Bring components to WCAG 2.2 AA, and make conformance part of how new components are built and reviewed. - Define adoption, component health, accessibility, and Figma-to-code parity measures with engineering, and report against them. - Run the contribution governance model, with defined routes for components between an experimental layer and the core system. - Champion Suitcase across Builders, explain the reasoning behind decisions, and coach designers and engineers on using and contributing to the system. What you'll need - Strong product design experience, including time spent designing and scaling design systems for a fast-growing product on web and mobile. - A deep grasp of typography, colour, layout, motion, and micro-interactions. - Judgement on when the system needs a new component and when an existing one should be used. - Experience designing and maintaining token systems, including naming, theming, documentation, and Figma-to-code workflows, and working knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. - Practical experience designing components for WCAG 2.2 AA standards, including keyboard and screen-reader behaviour. - Experience prototyping with AI tools and with Storybook, Code Connect and MCP tooling, and an understanding of how they connect design systems to code and AI tools. - The ability to take non-designers from the problem to the decision to the outcome and build adoption by persuasion. - A clear opinion of what good looks like, and the ability to make trade-off decisions and defend them. - Experience using customer insight from research, support and sales as well as team data, and taking ownership of business outcomes. - A clear voice in shaping roadmap, sequencing and scope, and the ability to push back, including when the system is being bypassed, without damaging the relationship. - Experience integrating or consolidating design systems. - Familiarity with content and localisation considerations in components. AI at Perk AI is embedded in how we work across every function. The tools you'll use day-to-day are AI-enabled so you can move faster and spend more time on the work that matters. In practice, that means using AI to research and prioritise accounts, draft and refine outreach, handle customer interactions more effectively, synthesise information, and cut through shadow work - the invisible tasks that pull people away from the work only they can do - so you can focus on relationships and outcomes. How We Work At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work. For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and/or resume. Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We’re an equal opportunity employer, which means you’re welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you’re from, or anything else that makes you, well, you. Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com http://perk.com or @externalperk.com http://externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk .com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate. #LI-Hybrid