Design Systems, Design Lead

We’re looking for our first Design Systems Design Lead—a visionary and systems-oriented designer ready to build the foundations of design consistency and scalability across our products and touchpoints.

As the Design Systems Design Lead, you will own the creation, evolution, and adoption of NinjaTrader’s design system. This is a hands-on role with strategic impact. You’ll partner with designers across multiple product teams, engineers, and other collaborators to ensure a unified experience across our ecosystem.

You’ll establish the principles, patterns, tooling, and governance models that guide building and scaling high-quality, consistent interfaces. You’ll also lead the charge in driving adoption, measuring impact, and evangelizing design systems as a core part of our product development process.

In this role you will:

Define & Build

• Build over our existing design system to scale it to a cross-platform design system serving all user touchpoints — tokens, components, documentation, and interaction guidelines

• Establish and maintain accessibility, visual consistency, and usability standards across all digital touchpoints

• Design reusable UI components and patterns that serve multiple products and platforms (web, mobile, desktop)

Drive Adoption

• Partner with product designers, researchers, writers, and engineers to integrate the system into design and product workflows

• Facilitate onboarding, training, and documentation that make it easy to use and extend the system

• Establish governance models for evolving the system collaboratively across teams

Measure & Evolve

• Define success metrics for adoption, usability, and quality

• Continuously evaluate system performance and gather feedback to iterate and improve

• Stay current with best practices and innovations in design systems and advocate for scalable, forward-looking approaches

 What you'll need:

Experience & Expertise

• 7+ years of experience in product or systems design, including at least 2 years focused on design systems

• Deep knowledge of UI/UX best practices, design tokens, accessibility standards, and responsive design

• Demonstrated success in launching or scaling a design system within a digital product environment that spans across multiple products

• Experience leading 1–2 visual and product designers to build and manage all aspects of the Design System and closely partnering with Engineering partners on Design System

Skills & Tools

• Proficiency in tools like Figma, Storybook, and other design system platforms

• Strong understanding of front-end development principles (you don’t need to code, but you speak dev)

• Experience working in cross-functional teams with designers and engineers

Mindset & Approach

• Systems thinker who can see both the forest and the trees — balancing design consistency with flexibility

• Clear communicator who can explain the “why” behind the system

• Self-starter who thrives in ambiguous, build-from-scratch environments

• Collaborative and diplomatic — able to advocate for standards while enabling creativity

 Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $180,000 - $200,000 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 12%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 18 days per year (some positions may qualify for more) plus seven paid holidays. Additional details on our total compensation package and benefits are listed below.