Design System and Operations Lead

About UOB

United Overseas Bank Limited (UOB) is a premier bank in ASEAN with an extensive global presence spanning Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based in Singapore, UOB operates through multiple subsidiaries and about 430 branches across 19 markets. With a culture rooted in the UOB Way and four core values—Honourable, Enterprising, United, and Committed—the bank has upheld these principles for over 90 years, focusing on customer integrity, internal collaboration, and community value. UOB fosters sustainable career growth for employees, emphasizing purpose, strong values, and meaningful opportunities.

Role Overview

The Experience Design team at UOB TMRW orchestrates customer customer journeys through a unified approach involving product designers, UX researchers, content creators, design operations, and system designers. The team collaborates closely with journey owners, stakeholders, and tech teams to translate user needs and business demands into intuitive, accessible digital banking experiences, covering all stages from discovery through delivery and quality assurance.

This position seeks a Design System Lead to oversee the development, quality assurance, and organization-wide adoption of UOB TMRW’s design system for native mobile and web platforms. The successful candidate will ensure the system offers a dependable framework comprising reusable components, patterns, tokens, and guidelines, partnering with engineering for alignment and managing ongoing design operations and process integration across teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Steer the vision and roadmap of the design system, balancing customer demands, business goals, delivery needs, and future enhancements.
• Interpret and prioritize requests from diverse teams and markets, deciding when to reuse, improve, or introduce new system capabilities and accommodate exceptions.
• Lead the creation and maintenance of high-quality, reusable design elements addressing visual, interactive, content, accessibility, and error state considerations.
• Collaborate closely with engineering to synchronize design libraries with implemented components, maintaining consistent user experiences across platforms while respecting localisation and platform conventions.
• Establish governance frameworks defining proposal, review, approval, and contribution procedures for design system updates, ensuring clarity in ownership, quality, and documentation.
• Maintain transparency on system changes, dependencies, and exceptions so teams understand availability and usage impacts.
• Promote the design system’s integration into daily workflows by offering guidance, examples, workshops, and training for product and technology teams.
• Lead and mentor the design system team, prioritizing quality and supporting pattern improvements informed by research and customer feedback.
• Manage design processes across the delivery lifecycle, clarifying roles and improving tooling and collaboration to reduce redundancy and uncertainty.
• Coordinate design quality assurance alongside testing and technology teams, prioritizing defects and using insights to improve system robustness.
• Oversee app-store management responsibilities related to design, ensuring readiness and coordination across business and technical stakeholders.
• Advance foundations for AI-enabled design and delivery workflows by structuring design information for machine-readability and evaluating AI tool efficacy.
• Monitor adoption rates, reuse, defect frequency, and contribution quality to guide continual improvements and communicate progress to stakeholders emphasizing practical benefits.

Experience and Skills

• Leadership in managing and scaling design systems within digital product environments, including hands-on development of design system components and practices.
• Proficiency with design tools like Figma, encompassing libraries, components, variants, and variables, along with strong familiarity with interface design principles, component architectures, templates, and design tokens.
• Expertise supporting both native mobile applications and responsive web designs, including considerations for accessibility, platform-specific conventions, localisation, and customer segmentation without excessive fragmentation.
• Experience collaborating closely with engineering teams to align designs with technical implementations and resolve discrepancies.
• Operational knowledge of design workflows, documentation, tooling, quality assurance, testing methodologies, and app-store processes.
• Strong stakeholder management capabilities to balance priorities, communicate decisions, and negotiate effectively across multidisciplinary teams.
• Effective team leadership, including coaching, setting clear expectations, and fostering adoption of design standards.
• Awareness of AI-assisted workflows in design, with practical experience or understanding of structured design knowledge for automation, while applying sound judgement to balance AI use with human oversight.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver measurable improvements in design consistency, accessibility, system uptake, and delivery quality.
• Experience working in complex or regulated environments, such as financial services or multi-market organizations, with the capacity to enhance existing processes while maintaining consistent support.

Additional Information

Competencies emphasized include Development, Engagement, Execution, and Strategic Thinking. UOB is an equal opportunity employer welcoming all individuals regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or other non-merit factors. Employment decisions focus solely on business needs and qualifications. Accommodation requests for the recruitment process are welcomed.