Principal Product Designer in Newcastle upon Tyne

Principal Product Designer

Location: Remote UK

Contract: Permanent

Hours: 37.5 hours (Core hours 10:00am - 2:00pm Monday - Friday)

We're here to help those who teach. It's what brings us to work every day. At Twinkl, we've been providing educators across the world with high quality, trusted teaching and learning resources for over a decade now. They're all written and checked by our wonderful team of experienced educators, and there are hundreds of thousands of resources to download, with new ones added daily.

The digital product team is dedicated to creating innovative and engaging digital experiences for children and educators. We are committed to enriching the lives of users through interactive and educational applications that inspire creativity, learning, and fun.

We're looking for an experienced Principal Product Designer to own the direction of our design system. The system spans customer-facing and B2B products across web and mobile, and it is the lever that lifts quality, consistency and delivery speed everywhere at once. You will define what the system covers and how it is governed, you will build a large part of it yourself, and you will get it adopted by designers and engineers who have their own roadmaps to hit. This is a hands-on individual contributor role who will set the standard through the work and through influence.

Ongoing projects/how you'll spend your day:

• Design system direction and governance: Define what the design system is for, what it covers and where it stops, and turn that into design principles and a roadmap other teams can plan against. Establish how the system is governed: how a component is proposed, reviewed, versioned, deprecated and documented, and who decides. Own the review gates that keep the system coherent as more people contribute to it.
• Building the system: Design and ship the system itself, hands on. Components, composed modules and page templates, built for the real range of states, breakpoints, themes and content that Twinkl's products throw at them. Own the token layer, from foundations through to the semantic tokens product teams actually use, and resolve the intricate edge cases nobody else has been able to close out.
• Adoption and enablement: Treat adoption as the measure of success rather than the size of the library. Work alongside engineering on the coded implementation so design and code stay one system rather than two, run contribution and office-hours forums, write the guidance, and make it easier to use the system than to work around it. Anticipate the dependencies across product, engineering and platform work that decide whether a release lands.
• Accessibility and inclusion as a system property: Build WCAG 2.2 AA conformance into the components themselves, so accessible behaviour, focus handling, semantics and contrast are inherited by default rather than rebuilt per feature. Challenge design and technical assumptions that would exclude educators or learners, and hold the standard in reviews.
• Leverage customer insights: Partner with the UXR and customer insights teams to understand how educators and learners actually move through our products, and turn that into system-level decisions, information architecture and patterns rather than one-off fixes. Frame the underlying user problem precisely, so the system solves it once for everybody.
• Measuring the system: Define the measures that show whether the system is working, including adoption, design and code parity, drift, detach rates and time saved on delivery. Use that evidence to decide what to build next, what to retire, and where to push back, and build the narrative that helps senior stakeholders see the trade-offs.
• End-to-end design on high-stakes work: Take the hardest journeys yourself, from problem framing through to implementation-ready specification and prototypes. This is where new patterns get proven before they enter the system, and it keeps the system honest about what shipping actually requires.
• Mentoring and raising the craft: Coach designers and engineers on using and extending the system well, review their work, and advocate for design across the organisation. You will not have direct reports, and you will still be the person people bring their hardest craft problem to.

To succeed in the role, you will:

• Be Systems-Minded: See the pattern behind the request, and know when to solve one team's problem and when to solve it once for everyone. Judge when a component belongs in the system and when it should stay local.
• Demonstrate Strong Leadership: Set direction and lift the standard across several product areas without formal authority, taking responsibility for the collective result rather than only your own output.
• Communicate Effectively & Collaboratively: Explain complex system decisions and their trade-offs clearly to designers, engineers, product managers and senior stakeholders, and bring people with you when the answer is not the one they wanted.
• Be Detail-Oriented: Hold a very high bar on craft, naming, documentation and consistency, because in a design system a small error is inherited by every product that uses it.
• Manage Projects Efficiently: Run system work alongside product delivery, sequencing it so teams are never blocked waiting on a component, and estimating honestly.
• Be Adaptable & have a growth mindset: Thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, adapt when priorities shift, and stay open to being shown a better answer.

We're interested in people that have:

• Bachelor's degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field.
• At least 8 years of experience in product design focused on user-centred design projects across web and apps, preferably education technology or related industry.
• At least 3 years defining, setting and governing a design system, including its scope, principles, contribution and review model, versioning and deprecation.
• 5+ years hands-on delivery of design system components, modules and templates, in production and in use by other teams.
• Demonstrable experience of design tokens and theming, and of keeping a design library and its coded implementation in step.
• Proficiency in Figma, including variables, component properties and library management, plus enough fluency in front-end code to work credibly with engineers on the implementation.
• Practical experience of AI tools such as Claude in design work, for example drafting component documentation, auditing a library for inconsistencies, or scaffolding prototypes, with sound judgement about where their output needs checking.
• Strong portfolio showing the system you built, how it was governed, and the adoption it achieved, alongside your product design process and final designs.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Experience implementing accessibility standards and best practices, including WCAG 2.2.
• An understanding of the EdTech landscape, gamification, and emerging technologies such as AI is a plus.

If you require a reasonable adjustment to the application/selection process to enable you to demonstrate your ability to perform the job requirements please include this at the foot of your covering letter. This will help us to understand any modifications we may need to make to support you throughout our selection process.

Benefits:

• In return for everything you can bring, we can offer you an exciting role in a fast-growing and dynamic business, with plenty of career opportunities.
• A friendly, welcoming and supportive culture. We believe work should be fun and always put people before the process
• Diversity, inclusion and belonging - our Employee Network Program includes working groups for LGBTQ+, People of Colour, Disabilities (visible and invisible), Women in Tech and Working Parents.
• From day 1 - Westfield Health, 33 annual leave days per year (pro-rata) inclusive bank holidays, a \"Me\" day each year, a charity day each year, flexible working policy with opportunities to work from home and Twinkl subscriptions.
• Quarterly company awards programme
• Seasonal events
• Referral scheme
• Company sick pay after 3 months of service
• After probation - cycle-to-work scheme
• Long-term service reward - Life insurance, enhanced pension contribution, enhanced maternity pay, enhanced adoption pay and enhanced paternity pay, long service award, long service annual leave