Lead Product Designer, Design Systems

Welcome to the video first world. From your everyday PowerPoint presentations to Hollywood movies, AI will transform the way we create and consume content. Today, people want to watch and listen, not read. This is true both at home and at work.

Despite the clear preference for video, communication and knowledge sharing in the business environment are still dominated by text, largely because high-quality video production remains complex and challenging to scale—until now.

Meet Synthesia. We’re on a mission to make video easy for everyone. Born in an AI lab, our AI video communications platform simplifies the entire video production process, making it easy for everyone, regardless of skill level, to create, collaborate, and share high-quality videos. Whether it’s for delivering essential training to employees and customers or marketing products and services, Synthesia enables large organizations to communicate and share knowledge through video quickly and efficiently.

We’re trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald’s and more. In February 2024, G2 named us as the fastest growing company in the world. Today, we’re at a $2.1bn valuation and we raised our Series D in 2025. This brings our total funding to over $330M from top-tier investors, including Accel, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Google and top founders and operators including Stripe, Datadog, Miro, Webflow, and Facebook.

About The Role: As our Lead Product Designer on our Design System, you will be the architect of our UI's "Source of Truth." You will move beyond visual mocks to define the behaviour, semantics, and logic that allow our engineers, and our AI-driven development tools like Cursor, to build with speed and stability. You will ensure that as we scale to meet the needs of the world's largest enterprises, our product remains compliant with global regulations like EAA 2025, and accessible to every user, regardless of how they interact with their screen.

In This Role You Will:

• Own the Semantic System: Move beyond visuals to define keyboard flows, focus orders, and ARIA semantics that engineers can’t reliably infer from mocks alone.
• Bridge Design & Code: Maintain a tight loop between Figma and React, ensuring our design tokens and components are robust and accessible by default.
• Future-Proof for AI: Stabilise our component architecture to unlock the full potential of LLM-driven development, providing the high-quality context that AI tools need to be productive.
• Set Accessibility Policy: Define the "Definition of Done" for accessibility across the product, running assistive-tech tests and making critical UX trade-offs such as captioning UX, and audio descriptions to prevent costly engineering rework.
• Enable the Product Team: Act as a force multiplier for our product designers and engineers, providing them with the tools and patterns to ship complex features without compromising on consistency or compliance.

You Should Apply If You Bring:

• Significant experience building and scaling Design Systems for complex SaaS web apps.
• Deep Accessibility Expertise and a firm understanding of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) requirements.
• Technical fluency meaning you are as comfortable discussing React component logic as you are in Figma.
• You understand how design tokens and CSS variables impact engineering velocity.
• Systems Thinking and the ability to see the "lego blocks" within a complex video editor and standardise them into reusable, stable patterns.
• Strategic Opinion with Strong views on when to use "standard" vs. "custom" UI and the ability to articulate the ROI of accessibility to both Product and Engineering leadership.
• Communication Skills that enable you to document complex behaviours clearly so they can be parsed by both human developers and LLMs.

Our culture: At Synthesia we’re passionate about building, not talking, planning or politicising. We strive to hire the smartest, kindest and most unrelenting people and let them do their best work without distractions. Our work principles serve as our charter for how we make decisions, give feedback and structure our work to empower everyone to go as fast as possible.

Benefits:

• You will be compensated well with a generous salary and equity.
• Flexible, hybrid role based of our London office.
• You get 25 days of annual leave + local holidays.
• Regular team offsites where you’ll get to collaborate with the product & engineering team in person.
• Work from home budget.
• Work from anywhere policy of 60 days per year.
• You will join an established company culture with regular socials.
• You can participate in a generous referral scheme.
• Huge opportunity for a career defining role as we go from a series D scale-up with strong PMF to the next phase of growth.