Design system manager

ABOUT PENNYLANE

OUR VISION

We aim to become the most beloved financial Operating System of French SMEs and Accounting Firms (and soon, European ones).

We help entrepreneurs rid themselves of time-consuming tasks related to accounting and finance while providing them with access to key financial information to assist in making the best decisions for their business.

About Us

Pennylane is one of the fastest growing Fintechs in France (and soon to be in Europe!)

In 6 years of existence, we've managed to:

• Make ourselves known as a groundbreaking accounting and financial software for small businesses and their accountants
• Raise a total of €225 millions, including from Sequoia, the famous fund from the Silicon Valley who invested early in companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, Paypal and much more...
• ‍‍‍ Grow from 7 cofounders to 650+ happy Pennylaners: we're now recognized as one of the greatest places to work in France (and also remotely), with a 4.6/5 rating on Glassdoor.
• Build an international environment with more than 25 nationalities, with a strong remote-friendly culture, where 30% of the employees are already working from all parts of Europe
• Earn the trust of thousands of customers and accounting firms and obtain outstanding ratings
• Already more than 400,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and over 4,500 accounting firms use Pennylane in France!

DESIGN AT PENNYLANE

Design sits at the centre of this mission and its purpose is to deliver a seamless, accessible and enjoyable experience for our users. Our team of 40+ product designers work across different tracks that are divided into cross-functional squads each consisting of Engineering, Product and Design. Autonomy, trust and transparency are the key values upon which our culture is built, this is directly reflected in how our designers operate on a day-to-day basis.

At Pennylane, designers are expected to actively contribute all the way from defining the problem space, to research and testing.

We are seeking a Design System Manager to own Purse, our design system, as a product: its vision, roadmap, governance, and quality bar. As we grow from 40 to 60+ designers across web, mobile, and tablet in multiple languages, you'll set the long-term direction of the system while staying hands-on and building it yourself, providing craft leadership to our Design System Designers and tapering direct production as the team grows. You'll partner with the Design Ops Manager on shared priorities and with engineering on design–code parity.

You'll be accountable for how the system scales, how it's adopted, and how it evolves toward an AI-ready future. If you think about a design system as a product — with users, a roadmap, a quality bar, and adoption metrics — and you love balancing long-term vision with pragmatic, milestone-driven delivery, you'll thrive at Pennylane.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

DESIGN SYSTEM STRATEGY & VISION

• Experience owning the vision and roadmap of a design system at scale, supporting 40+ designers and engineers across web, mobile, and tablet
• Ability to balance an ambitious long-term vision with pragmatic, milestone-driven delivery that creates value at every step
• Strong product sense applied to a design system — treating it as a product with users, adoption metrics, and a roadmap

GOVERNANCE & OPERATING MODEL

• Experience defining and evolving design system governance and contribution models that balance autonomy and consistency
• A track record of setting and holding a quality bar for components, tokens, patterns, and accessibility as contribution volume grows
• Comfort making tooling and infrastructure decisions that affect the system, in partnership with design ops and engineering

CRAFT & TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP

• A genuine maker who is hands-on today, with a small team you personally author components, tokens, and patterns and maintain the Figma library rather than only directing the work, tapering direct production toward review and orchestration as the team grows
• Deep design-system craft, components, APIs, token systems, semantic naming, theming / multi-brand, with the ability to provide craft direction and mentorship to IC designers
• Strong technical acumen and a clear understanding of how design systems are implemented in code, comfortable in a production-first environment where code is the source of truth
• Expertise in what makes a design system interpretable by AI: structured, machine-readable, AI-ready documentation, and how LLMs and codegen agents consume a system (MCP, token automation)

ENABLEMENT, ADOPTION & COMMUNICATION

• Demonstrated ability to drive system adoption through evangelism, clear narratives, and presentations to diverse audiences including leadership
• Experience defining system-health and adoption metrics and reporting system value and ROI to leadership
• Strong partnership …