Design Systems Designer

This is an outside IR35 contract.

Nando’s is on a journey to Create Lasting Happiness, making a difference to the lives of our people, our customers, and the communities we work in. Originally started in Johannesburg, South Africa, we pride ourselves on creating memorable experiences for everyone involved in Nando’s: from our employees, communities, founders, and suppliers, but most importantly, our customers.

We’re looking for an exceptionally detailed oriented, Design Systems Designer with a strong sense of flair and negotiation skills.

We’ve built a robust system run by a strong, dedicated team. While workflows, tooling and processes are in place, there’s plenty of room for you to bring your ideas, make an impact, and shape how we continue to evolve.

A day in the life...

• Lead the development of the design system, working with the Head of UX Design and Tech Lead to ensure scalable components across platforms and use cases. Collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers to define design requirements for the system.
• Possess the necessary UI skills to take existing conceptual work and transform them into scalable and user-friendly designs while maintaining their unique style and visual appeal.
• Create and maintain design guidelines, patterns, and component documentation across Figma and Zeroheight, ensuring what is documented accurately reflects what has been implemented in code. This includes identifying and resolving drift between the Figma library, Zeroheight, and the component library.
• Conduct systematic reviews of the design system to identify inconsistencies between design, documentation, and implementation. Make principled decisions about what to consolidate, update, or deprecate, and communicate those decisions clearly to the team.
• Ensure we design our experiences to enable Customers and Nandocas to seamlessly transition between our digital and physical channels. A champion of accessibility, you will ensure our digital products and services are inclusive for all.
• Uses AI-assisted tools fluently in design practice and can set up workflows that other team members can pick up and build on.
• Brings considered judgement about where AI accelerates design system work and where it risks fragmenting it, with a critical eye for the "almost right" outputs that are hardest to catch.
• Comfortable using AI-assisted design tools to accelerate component production, with a clear methodology for validating outputs against system standards before publication.
• Understands design token architecture at a practical level, including Figma variables and token hierarchy, and can structure and document tokens in a way that supports both adoption and downstream AI-assisted workflows.
• Have excellent negotiation skills and work closely with designers and engineers to ensure seamless integration and implementation of the design system within our digital products.
• Know that words and narrative play a strong part in explaining design decisions and presenting work with the relevant context to the UXD team, peers and stakeholders.
• Suggest improvements in existing methodologies and best practices for design systems. Contribute to our communities of practice through knowledge-sharing and presentations with other members of the UXD and design system team.

Hot Skills

• 5+ years of experience in a Design System role
• Delivered multiple instances of successful work within product areas, with a solid understanding of design systems, the double diamond process, heuristics and UX methodologies.
• Be a strong collaborator, balancing the voice of the systems user with business goals, while pushing for the best end user experience possible.
• Excellent attention to detail and craft, you pick on up the little things before anyone else.
• Experience in the use of motion with UI to production level.
• Proficiency in Figma is essential, including the ability to build and maintain design components, ensuring consistent and efficient design implementation across projects.
• Passionate about all things design with a good level of product thinking, market fit and customer experience.
• Aware your words count. How you describe your design decisions is as important to the success of your work as the work itself.
• Someone who wants to show up as the best version of you at work.
• Inspiring. What can we learn from you as much as what can you learn from us.
• In depth knowledge in your subject matter, strong knowledge other domains, the holistic customer experience and the business.