Staff Product Designer

**The position**:
At Hive, we're building the leading operations platform for independent commerce. As we scale our product suite — from merchant tooling to warehouse operations and end-customer experiences — the complexity of our challenges is increasing, and our systems need to evolve to keep pace.

We're looking for a Staff Product Designer, Design Systems to lead the next phase of our design system and broader design ops efforts. This high-impact IC role is all about laying the foundations that help teams move faster, more cohesively and with higher quality at scale. You'll partner closely with the Head of Design and engineering leads to shape our system's direction, drive adoption, and embed practices that reduce friction in day-to-day work.

This role spans both craft and operations: you'll evolve our component libraries and tooling, while also shaping workflows, rituals and documentation that enable great design at scale. Your work will streamline how design happens — supporting clarity, consistency and velocity across teams.

You'll be the first in this role — with the chance to define what great looks like, set long-term vision and lead strategic initiatives that touch every part of our product and design organisation. If you thrive in systems thinking, love scaling impact through others, and want to help shape a design org from the ground up, this one's for you.

***What you'll do**:

- Lead the evolution of our design system across Hive's product suite. Defining long-term strategy, system architecture and how we scale quality.
- Partner closely with engineering counterparts to evolve our system and maintain design-dev parity (e.g. Storybook, tokens), ensuring high-fidelity implementation and scalable architecture.
- Design and document reusable components, patterns and design tokens that enable consistency across products while leaving room for thoughtful variation.
- Establish and improve system governance (e.g. contribution models, adoption processes) in partnership with engineering — ensuring our system is robust, flexible and well-maintained.
- Drive the creation of internal documentation, tooling and rituals that enable designers and engineers to confidently use, extend and evolve the system.
- Champion accessibility and usability across all facets of the system, ensuring components meet best practices and align with WCAG standards.
- Mentor other designers across the team, sharing systems knowledge and raising the bar for design quality and systems thinking in a supportive, generous way.
- Lead initiatives that improve our systems maturity, from evolving component libraries to piloting automation or AI-driven workflows.
- Help define how we measure quality, scale design craft and support a shared culture of excellence across the design team and beyond.
- Collaborate across Product, Design and Engineering as part of a core team shaping systems and enablement strategy at Hive — laying the foundations for our next chapter of scale.

**Your profile**:

- A systems thinker with experience owning or co-owning a design system — from evolution and adoption to maintenance and governance.
- Strong systems design portfolio with a high bar for interaction, visual and implementation detail.
- Deep experience in Figma and exposure to working with design tokens, Storybook or other component-driven frameworks.
- Strong cross-functional collaborator, with a track record of driving alignment with engineers and crafting tools or workflows that scale across teams.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and highly autonomous; able to shape the system's roadmap and vision, not just execute on it.
- Passionate about mentorship, knowledge-sharing and elevating the team around you. You bring others along with generosity and encouragement.
- Pragmatic, outcome-focused and capable of navigating trade-offs between design purity and engineering feasibility.
- Experience in B2B SaaS or internal tools is a plus — especially if you've built systems that support broad platforms or infrastructure layers.

Bonus points for:

- Prior exposure to design automation, AI tooling, or design ops
- Experience introducing accessibility improvements in a systems context

**Our offering**:

- **Be part of the Hive.**
Become part of a high-performing team of exceptional people from McKinsey, Amazon, Shopify, Google, Blackstone, J.P. Morgan, DHL, and more. At Hive, we foster a culture of trust, collaboration, and constructive feedback—where people are empowered to grow and make a real impact.
- **Make your mark.**
Shape the future of commerce operations in a fast-scaling company with a strong entrepreneurial mindset. You'll work on exciting challenges from Day 1 and grow alongside Hive as we expand across Europe.
- **Competitive compensation.**
We offer market-competitive salaries, including an equity incentive plan (EIP) for all full-time team members.
- **Tools to thrive.**
You'll receive a MacBook and the tools that suit your working style best