Head of Design System (x/f/m)
HybridBerlin, State of Berlin, Germany
Job Summary
Set the multi-year vision and roadmap for Oxygen, translating system health into business impact and owning the investment strategy for design, engineering, and brand teams. Establish cross-functional governance across Design, Product, Engineering, and Brand, defining contribution models, change management processes, and standards for AI-first interfaces. Own design output quality across the product to ensure coherence and consistency at every touchpoint, while defining and driving cross-organizational adoption measured by component coverage and contribution velocity. Manage and grow a team of design system designers and engineers, setting career paths and hiring for the system's next needs. This role operates within a cloud-native platform serving 90 million patients and 400,000 healthcare professionals, leveraging AI ethically to improve daily lives in a regulated, multi-market healthcare context.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in product design or design systems
- proven track record of scaling a mature, complex system across multiple product teams or lines of business
- engineering fluency
- understanding of the technical architecture of a design system
- understanding of how platform teams operate
- knowledge of the latest best practices in AI-first software engineering as it relates to design systems
- demonstrated senior stakeholder management skills
- ability to negotiate priorities with leadership at Director level and above across large, distributed organizations
- ability to drive change management at scale
- data-informed and outcome-oriented approach
- experience measuring system health in real metrics (adoption rate, handoff defect rate, contribution velocity)
- ability to connect those numbers to product quality and business outcomes
- experience in a regulated, enterprise, or healthcare-adjacent context
- knowledge of accessibility (WCAG)
- knowledge of localization (i18n, RTL)
- knowledge of multi-market constraints
- fluency in English
Desired Qualifications
- experience owning large-scale change management programs across cross-functional organizations
- experience speaking additional European languages, such as French, German, or Italian
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