Senior Design Technologist

About us

At Datacom, we combine technology, expertise, and talented people to help organisations thrive in a rapidly changing world. As one of Australasia's leading technology providers, we work with customers across industries to solve real-world problems and deliver meaningful outcomes.

Whether we're supporting governments, enterprise organisations, or growing businesses, we're committed to creating meaningful outcomes for our customers, communities, and each other.

About the Role

The Senior Design Technologist role sits at the intersection of design systems thinking and engineering delivery. Working closely with design leadership, researchers, and engineering teams, you’ll own the technical implementation of the design system and help ensure it remains the single source of truth across the organisation.

You’ll be responsible for building and maintaining scalable component libraries, design tokens, UX guidelines, and production-ready UI components that enable efficient and consistent product delivery. This role combines strong front-end engineering capability with deep design systems knowledge, helping bridge the gap between validated design decisions and working code.

You’ll also contribute to the evolution of tooling, automation pipelines, and AI-augmented workflows that improve delivery velocity and support scalable product development practices.

Our offices are based across New Zealand. The core team is based in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, so these are our preferred locations. We like to bring people together in person when we can, but we are mindful of the benefits of working from home for work/ life balance. We therefore leave it to you and the team you join to figure out what works best!

What you’ll do

At the moment, as Senior Design Technologist you will be focused on:

• Owning and maintaining the design system as the single source of truth for components, patterns, interaction flows, and UX guidelines
• Building and maintaining production-ready UI components and scalable front-end patterns
• Encoding design decisions including design tokens, interaction patterns, accessibility requirements, and layout rules into structured, reusable systems
• Creating and maintaining clear, structured documentation for designers, engineers, and AI-assisted tooling
• Building and maintaining automation pipelines and tooling that translate design decisions into working code
• Ensuring front-end code quality, accessibility compliance (WCAG), performance, and standards alignment
• Partnering with engineering teams to support seamless integration between design system outputs and build processes
• Evolving the design system based on customer feedback, user insights, and research outcomes
• Contributing technical expertise to design and pattern governance discussions
• Evaluating emerging workflows, front-end technologies, AI tooling, and design-to-code capabilities to improve delivery efficiency
• Sharing knowledge and capability across teams to support scalable adoption of the design system
• Maintaining a high standard of visual craft and interaction quality as products scale
• Contributing to standardised approaches, tooling, and processes that support best practice across the design system discipline

We are an pretty agile company, and are keen to respond to customer, technology and internal stakeholders’ changing requirements and this can mean we evolve in our roles to meet those needs.

What you’ll bring

Required experience:

• 5+ years’ experience across UI/visual design and/or front-end development
• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining design systems or component libraries at scale
• Strong front-end development skills across HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks such as React
• Strong knowledge of design systems, token architecture, component APIs, and documentation standards
• Experience translating design decisions into production-quality front-end code
• Familiarity with modern tooling such as Figma, Storybook, GitHub, MUI, and design token pipelines
• Knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG), user-centred design principles, and information architecture
• Experience working within cross-functional teams alongside designers, researchers, and engineers
• Proven ability to create clear, structured system documentation consumable by both people and AI-assisted workflows
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to articulate technical and design decisions clearly
• Bachelor’s degree in Design, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline - or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have:

• Experience working in AI-augmented or AI-led product delivery environments
• Knowledge of agentic AI workflows, orchestration, and AI-assisted design-to-code pipelines
• Understanding of machine-readable documentation structures and AI context engineering
• Experience within SaaS or product-led environments
• Understanding of CMS and CRM platforms
• Front-end performance optimisation experience
• Relevant certifications in front-end development, UX/UI design, or design systems

Culture and benefits

Join a team where you'll be supported to grow your career, prioritise your wellbeing, and make a genuine impact. From industry-leading learning and development opportunities to parental leave, wellbeing support, and employee benefits, we're committed to helping our people thrive both professionally and personally

We're passionate about creating a workplace where people feel supported, empowered, and inspired to do their best work. Whether you're developing new skills, tackling complex challenges, or collaborating with some of the best minds in the industry, you'll be part of a team that values curiosity, innovation, inclusion, and making a genuine difference.

Why you will love working here

• Paid parental leave

• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme (DataCare)

• Ongoing learning, certifications, and career development opportunities

• Access to industry-leading learning platforms and future skills training

• Recognition programmes that celebrate great work

• Great employee discounts and financial wellbeing benefits

• Meaningful work that makes a real impact