Principal Designer

Overview

As Principal Designer at Mews, you will shape the division-level design substrate, including the design system, shared agents, and architectural standards that enable fast, cohesive growth. You’ll collaborate with Staff Designers to align tribe work into a coherent whole and act as the VP’s right hand on complex cross-tribe design problems. Your craft-focused leverage will drive reusable patterns and systemic improvements, not one-off artifacts. This role offers autonomy, impact, and the chance to elevate design across the organization.

Pay / Benefits

• Unlimited paid holiday
• Company share program
• Paid parental leave
• Annual learning budget
• Monthly EDGE time
• Work from anywhere policy with abroad flexibility

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the division’s shared design foundation—design system, cross-tribe agents, research engines, design architecture, principles, and standards.
• Develop multi-year design strategy and articulate future needs to the division, driving them with patience and conviction.
• Partner with Staff Designers to ensure tribe substrates form a coherent whole rather than isolated efforts.
• Serve as the VP’s advisor on complex cross-tribe design challenges beyond any single tribe’s scope.
• Contribute design craft feedback and calibration into performance reviews for Directors and Staff Designers.
• Encode judgment into systems by turning design thinking into reusable leverage: components, tokens, patterns, agents, and shared skills.

Key requirements

• A proven body of shipped, high-quality design work with strong taste
• Senior-level credibility across multiple tribes
• Multi-year thinking and ability to encode it into enduring systems
• Appreciation for unglamorous cross-tribe work and shared substrates
• High AI fluency to leverage design agents, systematized research, and scalable leverage
• Comfort influencing executives and acting as a force-multiplier without formal authority

• cross-tribe collaboration
• strategic thinking
• ownership and accountability
• design systems
• design architecture
• tokens and components

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