Design Program Manager

Role: Design Program Manager

Location: Anywhere in the US (100% Remote)

Duration: 12 Months Contract on W2

Role summary

• The Magnetic Design System team is seeking a Design Program Manager to build the operating rhythm that helps a complex, cross-functional design system scale.
• This role will connect strategy to execution across design, product management, engineering, platform teams, ambassadors, and leadership.
• The DPM will own the programs, processes, reporting, and follow-through that drive Magnetic adoption, improve review and change-management workflows, and keep design-system work visible, prioritized, and moving.
• The role will also partner closely with the Senior Manager of Magnetic to roadmap and execute a portfolio of forward-looking AI initiatives.
• This portfolio will help transition Magnetic from a primarily component-and-guidance system into an intelligent foundation for agentic workflows, automation, and AI-assisted product creation while maintaining quality, governance, accessibility, and trust.

Required qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading complex design, product, engineering, or platform programs with multiple teams and interdependent workstreams.
• Strong program-management fundamentals, including road mapping, planning, dependency and risk management, operating cadences, metrics, reporting, and executive communication.
• Experience working with design systems or adjacent platforms, developer-experience, product-design, or front-end engineering programs.
• Ability to translate ambiguous strategic goals into concrete programs, decisions, milestones, and accountable follow-through.
• Strong written and verbal communication, facilitation, synthesis, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Comfort using structured workflow and reporting tools such as Airtable, Jira, spreadsheets, dashboards, and collaborative documentation platforms.
• Working knowledge of modern AI capabilities and limitations, with the judgment to manage experimentation, quality, governance, and organizational change.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with enterprise-scale design-system adoption, contribution models, governance, component releases, or design QA.
• Experience launching AI-assisted design or engineering workflows, automation programs, internal platforms, or developer tooling.
• Familiarity with Figma, component libraries, design tokens, accessibility practices, front-end development workflows, and design-to-code tooling.
• Experience defining service levels and operational metrics for intake, review, support, or platform programs.
• A systems mindset and a record of simplifying fragmented processes into clear, durable operating models.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive adoption and platform-team success
• Establish and run recurring check-ins with product and platform teams to track adoption progress, surface blockers, identify component gaps, and coordinate decisions and follow-up.
• Maintain an accurate view of adoption phases, readiness, implementation milestones, quality-review needs, and risks across participating teams.
• Gather adoption data and translate it into scorecards, quarterly reports, leadership updates, and actionable insights.
• Coordinate implementation demos, assessments, onboarding, education, and quality reviews for teams adopting Magnetic.
• Partner with product management, design, and engineering to prioritize Magnetic design and component backlogs based on adoption blockers, customer impact, and strategic value.

Operate Magnetic reviews and change requests

• Manage the end-to-end Magnetic Review operating cadence, including intake readiness, submitter guidance, reviewer assignments, status tracking, issue resolution, and quarterly metrics.
• Run the change-request workflow:
• monitor intake,
• ensure requests are reviewed and acknowledged within five business days,
• track decisions and implementation, and
• close the loop with requestors.
• Improve and migrate review and change-request operations into scalable systems such as Airtable, with clear ownership, service levels, dashboards, and data quality standards.
• Use retrospectives and performance data to continuously improve cycle time, clarity, consistency, and stakeholder experience.

Coordinate design, engineering, and release quality

• Create forward visibility into engineering work that will require design QA across Magnetic React, Magnetic Web, Harbor, and related implementation surfaces.
• Track merge requests requiring design QA, assign the appropriate designer, monitor completion, and escalate risks or capacity constraints.
• Coordinate design readiness for component releases, including guidelines, documentation, examples, and stakeholder communications.
• Maintain a reliable weekly website-release cadence and a quarterly website roadmap aligned to current OKRs and product priorities.

Scale community, communications, and leadership follow-through

• Support the Magnetic Ambassador program, including program cadence, training activities, review scoring, participation tracking, and enablement.
• Coordinate release and program communications across the Magnetic website, Webex, Slack, mailers, office hours, and stakeholder forums.
• Maintain stakeholder maps, contact lists, meeting records, action logs, and decision history so the program operates from a dependable source of truth.
• Track requests and commitments originating from leadership channels; establish owners and dates, communicate status, and ensure timely resolution.

Lead the AI and Agentic transformation program

• Partner with the Senior Manager of Magnetic to define and execute a multi-horizon roadmap for how the design system will support AI-assisted and agentic product-development workflows.
• The DPM will turn emerging opportunities into governed, measurable programs that can be tested, learned from, and scaled.
• Translate the AI vision into a portfolio of work tracks with clear problems, outcomes, owners, dependencies, milestones, decision points, and success measures.
• Coordinate discovery and pilots spanning design-system knowledge, design-to-code, code-to-design, component recommendation and generation, automated documentation, accessibility and quality checks, contribution workflows, and agent-ready design-system data.
• Define intake, prioritization, experimentation, and governance mechanisms for AI initiatives, including human review, responsible-AI considerations, quality thresholds, and escalation paths.
• Establish learning loops and instrumentation to evaluate usefulness, accuracy, saved, adoption, quality, and downstream impact; use evidence to recommend when to stop, iterate, or scale a pilot.
• Identify capability, tooling, data, and process gaps required to make Magnetic consumable by agents and automation not only by people and coordinate plans to close them.
• Develop change-management and enablement plans that help designers and engineers adopt new AI supported workflows with confidence.

Role characteristics:

• This role is well suited to a program leader who enjoys creating clarity in complex environments, balancing strategic exploration with disciplined delivery, and helping teams move from individual efforts to a scalable operating system.
• The successful candidate will be curious about the future of design systems, rigorous about today s commitments, and energized by building the bridge between the two.

Thanks & Regards,

Aditya Kumar

Recruitment Manager Talent Acquisition

KAnand Corporation

Email: