Staff/Lead Product Designer, Design System

Job description

ROLE HIGHLIGHTS: - Staff/Lead Product Designer, Design System - Location: Espoo, Uusimaa, Finland - Department: Product Management - Reports to: Director of Product Design - Employment type: Permanent - Workplace model: Hybrid (3 days / week in office) - Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required) WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS: We don't have a design system. What we have is a set of products built fast, for users who needed the imagery yesterday, that share a brand without sharing much else. Buttons that quietly disagree with each other. Spacing as a matter of personal taste. Several defensible ways to build a table, none of them the same. Nobody was sloppy - this is what shipping under real pressure leaves behind, and the interest on it now comes out of every sprint. As a Staff / Lead Product Designer, you'll build the thing from nothing. That starts small and slightly unglamorous: a Figma library people actually reach for and a design playbook that settles the arguments worth settling. Then tokens with a structure that holds. Then components in code, documented well enough that nobody has to ask you how they work. By the time it's a design system in the full sense, the hardest part - people using it by default - is already solved, because you'll have built it in the open with the teams who had to adopt it. This is a hands-on, opinionated, sleeves-rolled-up role. You'll be the highest craft bar in the domain and the person who raises everyone else's. You'll spend as much time with frontend engineers as with designers, quite possibly in their repo. Real ownership. Very little existing process to inherit. If that sounds like a warning, it isn't. It's the job. WHO WE ARE ICEYE is the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space. We deliver persistent monitoring capabilities to detect and respond to changes in any location on Earth. ICEYE owns the world's largest and most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation. To our customers we provide intelligence with unmatched quality, latency and revisit times, in any weather, day or night. To governments who choose to operate their own constellation we provide this proven capability as a sovereign system. ICEYE-built constellations serve customers in defence and intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. We enable fast decisions that contribute to a safer future. Founded and headquartered in Finland, ICEYE operates globally with over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.. YOUR DAY-TO-DAY RESPONSIBILITIES - Start with a library and a playbook. Grow it into a system. Early on that means a Figma library, shared foundations and written guidance that gives teams a default instead of a decision. Later it means token architecture, components in code and documentation that scales past you. You'll decide the sequence, what's a token and what's a local decision, and where the line sits between flexibility and consistency. Those calls are yours to make, not to wait for. - Co-design with frontend, in the code. Our engineers will build most of the components. You'll be in the conversation about props, state and composition, reading PRs and prototyping in a branch when that's the fastest way to prove a point. Figma is where you think, not where the system ends up living. - Sell it. Repeatedly. A design system nobody adopts is a very tidy failure. You'll make the case to product managers, engineers and leadership, run office hours, and do migration work yourself when that's what unblocks a team. - Set and hold the craft bar. Across the whole domain, at the pixel level, in public. Kind about people, uncompromising about the work. - Put AI to actual work. Component documentation, variant generation, token maintenance, migration codemods, spec drafting. The tedious 60% of systems work is exactly what these tools are good at, and we want someone with strong instincts about which 60%. - Stay accountable for what ships. Adoption, consistency, shipped UI quality, how quickly teams can build - not the size of your Figma library. - Work across a big, networked organisation. Designers in other domains, brand and marketing design, sales engineers, customers. Consistency is a negotiation, not a mandate you email out. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Must haves: - You've done 0-to-1 before, somewhere messy. You've taken a design system from nothing to adopted, in an organisation that had neither and wasn't yet convinced it needed one. You know how the first six months actually go, which corners are safe to cut, and how to structure tokens so they survive the next product rather than getting quietly forked. - You're fluent enough in code to be useful. Reading React and CSS, understanding component APIs, running the repo locally, opening a PR without ceremony. You don't need to be an engineer, but you do need to h