Experience Designer - Design Systems (Midweight)
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 30 July 2025
Requisition ID: 400009056
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.
Design Systems - Experience Designer
At Sainsbury’s we believe that the customer should be at the heart of everything we do. Our vision is to create the easiest, most enjoyable experiences that better serve our customers’ ever-changing needs. We work across a range of products and services to deliver distinctive, integrated, and consistent experiences for our customers and colleagues across Sainsbury’s Group - which includes Sainsbury’s, Argos, Nectar, Habitat, Tu, and Smart Charge.
We drive brilliant experiences across all our brands in-store and online, operating in agile teams and squads, working seamlessly with teams right across the business to make the most of the exceptional knowledge, insight and talent we have.
The Role:
We are seeking a talented and passionate Experience Designer to join our Design System team. You will be instrumental in evolving and maintaining our multi-brand design system, empowering our product teams to build consistent, accessible, and delightful user experiences across all our platforms (Web, iOS and Android).
Responsibilities:
- Design System Design & Maintenance
- Design, document, and maintain reusable UI components, patterns and guidance for Web, iOS, and Android platforms.
- Continuously ensuring that our design system is accessible, performative, and adheres to brand standards.
- Partnering with our design system engineers to ensure proper implementation and integration of design system components.
- Lead and facilitate UI audits, pattern consolidation and design clean-up, driving consistency across complex product spaces.
- Contribute to the ongoing evolution and improvement of the design system architecture.
- Maintain and collect feedback around the design token infrastructure.
Collaboration & Advocacy:
- Work closely with Product Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers to understand their needs and gather feedback to further improve our Design System (Fable).
- Educate and advocate for the adoption of the design system across design and development teams.
- Facilitate workshops and training sessions to onboard new starters and continue to keep the design community well informed of updates.
- Present design system updates and progress to stakeholders.
Innovation:
- Stay up to date with industry trends, best practices, and new technologies related to design systems.
What we're looking for:
Industry experience as a UX / UI Designer is essential. As are the core technical skills outlined in the role details above. Alongside this, we're looking for certain behaviours and competency skills. These skills will help you thrive in a dynamic team like ours.
Skills we're looking for:
- Experience of working on a design system.
- Knowledge of how to design inclusively and an active interest for digital accessibility.
- Strong systems thinking and interaction design skills.
- Influence and negotiation skills.
- Adaptable to changing priorities, complexities and unknowns.
- Confidence to influence and challenge stakeholders.
- Taking the initiative and driving change.
- Experience of working with a design system.
- Tailoring your approach for different audiences.
- Expert proficiency in Figma, particularly with components, libraries, variables and tokens.
Bonus skills:
- Proficiency in crafting native app experiences for iOS and Android.
- A technical understanding of design systems and programming frameworks (React, Tailwind, Jetpack Compose, SwiftUI)
Essential Criteria -
- Systems thinking - as a Design System designer you need the ability to think holistically, foresee how components evolve across platforms, ensuring they are consistent and efficient solutions at scale.
- Cross-functional communication and collaboration - as a Design System designer it is important to be able to share designs to both technical and senior stakeholders.
- Proficient in Figma - at Sainsbury's, Figma is our Design System tool and so it is essential that a Design System designer understands features like components, variables, auto layout, and libraries.
- Problem solving - as a Design System designer it is important to identify inconsistencies, untangle complex challenges, and propose scalable, accessible solutions that prioritize user needs.
Support we will provide:
- A thriving design culture, opportunity to discuss and share work with open, collaborative feedback
- A mature design system and set of standards to work with
- Research, accessibility and UX copywriting expertise
Tips and guidance on what we look for in portfolios: https://medium.com/p/1ace9c422d2
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
