Senior Design Systems Specialist

About

Join TIH, home to some of South Africa’s leading financial service providers, and grow your career while being part of an organisation with purpose.

Job Purpose

The Senior Design Systems Designer is responsible for building, maintaining, and evolving a scalable design system that ensures consistency, efficiency, and compliance across all digital products and brands. This role enables teams to deliver cohesive, accessible, and trustworthy user experiences across apps, websites, internal platforms, and policy tools. Working closely with designers, developers, product managers, and brand teams, the designer will create reusable components, clear guidelines, and robust documentation. They will also drive governance to ensure alignment with brand, accessibility, and regulatory standards in the insurance space.

Responsibilities

Design and Conceptualisation & Maintenance

• Create, document, and maintain a library of reusable UI components, patterns, and design tokens.
• Ensure consistency and scalability of design elements across digital platforms (web, app, internal platforms - consultant portals and self-service tools).
• Maintain and evolve the Digital CI: Contribute to defining, documenting, and updating the Digital Corporate Identity to ensure consistency, accessibility, and scalability across all digital platforms.
• Support the broader design team with ad hoc design initiatives and projects when required.

Stakeholder Management

• Contribute to the management of partnering relationships with internal clients, building effective working relationships and providing high-quality professional services to support in delivering business strategy and plans.
• Cross-functional collaboration with product designers, UX writer, and developers to ensure the design system supports seamless end-to-end experiences across all platforms.
• Work closely with development teams to ensure components are built to specification and meet accessibility standards.

Governance & Standards

• Establish and uphold guidelines for usage, accessibility, and brand alignment within the design system.
• Conduct regular audits of digital products to identify inconsistencies and recommend improvements.

Customer Needs/Experience Research

• Gather feedback from design and development teams to refine and expand the design system over time.
• Stay up to date with design trends, tools, and best practices to evolve the design system.
• Support the implementation of differentiating customer experience initiatives, tools, and processes, including customer experience testing.

Product Training

• Develop training courses to meet identified needs in order to improve performance and meet business requirements.
• Provide training and documentation to help designers and developers adopt and use the system effectively.
• Act as a champion for design consistency and advocate for the value of design systems across the organisation.

Customer Experience Mapping

• Lead implementation and performance of techniques such as voice of the customer initiatives, journey mapping, and qualitative touchpoint analysis to identify customer pain points, challenges, and hurdles; advise on approaches to eliminate negative experiences and enhance customer interactions.

Product and Solution Development

• Define and deliver products and services that meet customer needs by selecting the best possible approaches available within established systems.

Improvement / Innovation

• Identify shortcomings and suggest improvements to existing processes, systems and procedures, then delivers a plan for a small element of a change management program with guidance from a project/program manager.

Personal Capability Building

• Act as subject matter expert in an area of expertise.
• Maintain external accreditations and in-depth understanding of current and emerging external regulation and industry best practices through continuing professional development, attending conferences, and reading specialist media.

Education

• Matric / Grade 12/ SAQA Accredited Equivalent (Essential)
• A relevant design related qualification (degree / diploma / certificate) (Essential) (Required)

Experience

• Minimum of 5 years professional experience in UX/UI or Product Design, of which 2 years focused experience on design systems (creation, maintenance, or governance).
• Experience in the Financial Services industry (Advantageous)

Think you have what it takes to be part of an unstoppable team who constantly finds better ways to give peace of mind? Don't wait, apply now.