Want to do work that really matters? At Checkatrade, we’re building the UK’s go-to home improvement marketplace. Every day, we help millions of homeowners find the right tradesperson for the job, fast, fair, and without the faff.
As our next Lead Design Systems Product Designer, you will architect and evolve the shared foundation our designers and engineers rely on every day. You will set direction, define principles, build components, and shape the tokens, motion and spacing that hold the system together. This is a hands-on leader role at the intersection of design, engineering and brand, where you guide standards, mentor others, and still get into the craft to make sure the system is clear, scalable and consistently used across all surfaces.
Forget long lists, here’s what you’ll actually spend your time on:
- You’ll shape and evolve our multi-platform design system across web, iOS and Android, from structure to spacing, motion to accessibility.
- You’ll manage the full architecture: components, tokens, patterns and docs. If it’s in Figma, you’ll be all over it.
- You’ll create design libraries that are a joy to use and trusted by engineers, balancing usability with technical accuracy.
- You’ll set up contribution models, governance, versioning and QA - making sure things run smoothly as the system scales.
- You’ll work closely with engineers and mentor designers, helping them design within the system, contribute to it, and get the most out of it.
- Around 70% of your time will be spent designing directly in the system. The rest? Driving adoption and improving the way we work.
This is an individual contributor role with real scope to grow into Principal - for someone who leads through credibility, not hierarchy.
About us
We’re Checkatrade – the UK’s leading platform for finding a tradesperson. With more than 50,000 trades listed and over 6 million reviews, we help homeowners get jobs done right and help tradespeople grow their business.
We’re growing fast, with big plans to become the go-to brand for home improvements. If you care about great work, take pride in the details, and want to make an impact, you’ll fit right in.
- Competitive salary + annual bonus or commission (role dependent)
- Health, well-being and learning support
- Gym membership, Smart Tech Scheme and Cycle Scheme
- Birthday/Special day leave
- Buy & sell holiday scheme
- 1 week’s paid charity leave and much more!
- A track record of building or evolving robust, multi-platform design systems - ideally in a mature product environment, not a first-version start-up environment.
- Systems thinking: the ability to connect tokens → components → patterns → brand → engineering in a cohesive, scalable way.
- Mastery of Figma, with experience in architecting libraries, not just consuming them.
- Familiarity with engineering workflows (React, Storybook, token pipelines) and the ability to collaborate deeply with engineers.
- Strong communication - the kind that brings clarity, structure, and calm to ambiguity.
- Curiosity, craft pride, and a roll-your-sleeves-up attitude.
