Design Team Lead

99brightminds is a technology services provider supporting digital transformation across multiple industries through offshore development centers, IT staff augmentation, managed software teams, and virtual CTO services. The company works with organizations that need scalable, high-quality delivery models and strong operational discipline to build and evolve digital products.

As Design Team Lead, you will shape and mature an enterprise Design Studio into a scalable, governed design function. This role sits at the intersection of design leadership, operational excellence, systems thinking, and executive influence, helping ensure design is positioned as a strategic capability that drives consistency, clarity, and measurable business value.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a large multidisciplinary team spanning UX, UI, Product Design, Design Systems, and DesignOps.
• Assess team skills, seniority, and capacity; maintain a skills matrix; address gaps through hiring and upskilling; allocate designers according to project needs, complexity, and capacity; and develop the next layer of design leadership.
• Define and govern a scalable design lifecycle from intake through UX, UI, Design QA, developer handover, and release.
• Establish clear gates, definitions of done, and SLAs; manage demand, capacity, and priorities; and track turnaround, rework, DLS adoption, and stakeholder satisfaction.
• Own the structure and governance of the Figma Enterprise environment, including teams, projects, libraries, access, permissions, and file lifecycle.
• Govern the Design Language System as a product, including contribution, versioning, releases, adoption, and alignment with coded components.
• Embed governed AI-assisted workflows across research, UX, UI, DLS documentation, Design QA, and design-to-code.
• Define approved tools, reusable workflows, human review points, and compliance controls, while measuring impact on productivity, cycle time, quality, and consistency.
• Represent the Design Studio with senior leadership, business and technology teams, and vendors.
• Translate complex design and AI topics into clear business narratives, influence decisions, align competing priorities, and constructively challenge requirements.
• Establish a federated governance model for internal, project, and vendor design teams.
• Lead onboarding, design reviews, and audits, enforce common standards, and prevent parallel design systems.

Requirements

Requirements

• Must: Proven corporate / large-enterprise experience within complex organizational structures, governance processes and senior stakeholder environments.
• 12+ years in UX/UI, Product or Experience Design, including 5+ years leading multidisciplinary design teams.
• Experience leading a large or distributed design organization and establishing a DesignOps operating model.
• Strong hands-on Figma Enterprise expertise (libraries, variables, permissions, Dev Mode, governance).
• Proven experience building or governing an enterprise-scale design system / DLS.
• Practical experience running AI-assisted design workflows in production, not only POCs.
• Strong design-to-development collaboration with engineering teams.
• Exceptional executive presentation, storytelling and stakeholder-management skills.