Principal Designer

Mews

12h•$157,000 - $202,000•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Designer is responsible for building and maintaining the design system, shared agents and skills, research engines, and architectural standards across the division. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on leveraging craft rather than managing a team. The role involves working directly with the VP and partnering with Staff Designers to connect their work into a coherent division-level structure and build systems that enhance design work at Mews.

Requirements

A body of shipped, high-quality design work and demonstrable taste. Senior enough to be credible across multiple tribes without needing to prove it.
Multi-year thinking. The ability to operate beyond the current quarter and to encode that thinking into systems and agents that outlast any single initiative.
A genuine taste for the unglamorous. Cross-tribe seams, shared substrate, and connective-tissue work don't carry a team's name on them. You need to find that kind of work genuinely satisfying.
High AI fluency. You build leverage at scale – design agents, shared skills, systematized research – because you understand that the highest-value contribution at this level is rarely the artifact you made yourself.
Comfort working as a force-multiplier for an executive without needing the title or formal authority that typically goes with that kind of influence.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain the division's shared design foundation – the design system, cross-tribe agents and skills, research and discovery engines, design architecture, principles and standards.
Hold the multi-year view. Write clearly about what design across the division will need that it doesn't yet have, and drive towards it with enough patience and conviction to see it through.
Partner with Staff Designers so that tribe-level design substrates compose into a coherent whole rather than a collection of parallel efforts.
Act as the VP's right hand on the most complex cross-tribe design problems – the ones that don't fit neatly inside any single tribe's scope.
Contribute craft feedback and calibration input into Director and Staff Designer performance reviews.
Encode judgment into systems. Turn design thinking into reusable leverage – components, tokens, patterns, agents, shared skills – rather than one-off artifacts that live and die with a single project.

Benefits

Unlimited paid holiday
Participation in our company share program
Paid parental leave (6 months fully paid for primary caregivers, 2 months for secondary, available after one year of service)
An annual Learning budget of €300 (and more for high performers) to support your development
Monthly "EDGE" time to Explore, Develop, Grow, and Elevate yourself
A work from anywhere policy with flexibility to work abroad for a few weeks each year
Relocation options, available after one year
Flexible, hybrid working options
A home office setup budget to make your workspace your own and a monthly work-from-home allowance
Claude tokens, so you can automate workflows and build smarter, more efficient ways of working