Principal UX Designer, Design Systems

The Vanguard Group•Charlotte, PA

8d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal UX Designer will provide hands-on design leadership for the Advisor Experience System (AXS), FAS’s shared design system. The role helps set the system’s technical design and craft direction, resolves complex design problems, and raises the quality of the system through direct design work. The designer will shape what the system can support and how it should be built, while not owning the overall product vision or roadmap alone. The position leads the evolution of reusable components, patterns, tokens, templates, and system foundations. It translates complex experience needs into accessible, scalable, practical-to-implement solutions; works closely with front-end engineers to align design and code; and creates clear specifications, documentation, guidance, and examples. The role also helps teams apply the system to product and marketing experiences, coaches designers, and explores workflows and tools—including semantic tokens, automated documentation, system-accurate prototyping, and AI-assisted design and development—that improve efficiency while maintaining quality, accessibility, and brand integrity. The Design Systems and Practices Team (DS+P) brings together systems design, visual strategy, and design practice. It sits within the larger user experience organization in Financial Advisor Services Digital & Analytics. The designer will collaborate with UX designers, product teams, engineers, content specialists, marketers, and other partners across Vanguard. This is a hybrid role based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, or Charlotte, North Carolina. The stated on-campus schedule is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with Monday and Friday remote.

Requirements

Significant UX and product design experience, including deep experience building or evolving enterprise design systems, component libraries, or scaled pattern ecosystems.
Expert knowledge of reusable system design, including components, variants, properties, tokens, patterns, templates, and documentation.
Strong visual and interaction design craft, with excellent judgment across typography, layout, hierarchy, behavior, responsiveness, and content patterns.
Experience designing complex components and accounting for states, edge cases, accessibility requirements, and implementation constraints.
Strong command of Figma, including variables, modes, component architecture, library management, prototyping, and modern design-system workflows.
Experience working closely with engineers to evaluate feasibility, clarify intended behavior, and maintain alignment between design and code.
Practical understanding of front-end concepts and how design decisions translate into production experiences; technical fluency is important, though this is not a developer role.
Deep knowledge of accessibility and ability to incorporate it into system architecture rather than treating it as a final review step.
Experience producing documentation and usage guidance that is clear, current, and useful.
Confidence to make recommendations, explain the reasoning, and adjust when stronger evidence or constraints emerge.
Ability to bring structure to ambiguous problems without overcomplicating the solution.
Collaborative, low-ego approach to design leadership, with ability to raise the bar while bringing others along.
Portfolio demonstrating relevant design-system work, complex component thinking, and ability to move from detailed design decisions to scalable solutions.

Nice To Haves

Experience with semantic token architecture, theming, or systems supporting multiple brands, products, or templates.
Experience connecting Figma libraries to engineering environments such as Storybook.
Experience with design-system documentation platforms, automated documentation, or workflows that help design and code stay synchronized.
Working knowledge of AI-assisted design and development workflows, including where they accelerate work and where human judgment remains essential.
Experience supporting both product applications and marketing or content-heavy web experiences.
Experience building systems within a highly regulated environment where accessibility, compliance, consistency, and risk management matter.
Experience teaching system concepts or coaching designers and developers in effective design-system use.
Academic, professional, or life experience outside traditional UX that adds a distinctive perspective to problem solving.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design and continued evolution of AXS components, patterns, tokens, templates, and system foundations.
Translate complex product and experience needs into reusable, accessible, scalable, and practical-to-implement solutions.
Own complex component and pattern architecture, including variants, states, behaviors, responsive considerations, and composition.
Establish a high bar for interaction, visual, and systems design quality across the library.
Lead design reviews and help the team make sound decisions when requirements, use cases, or technical constraints compete.
Partner closely with front-end engineers to align design and code, resolve implementation questions, and ensure the system works as intended.
Create and maintain clear documentation, usage guidance, specifications, and examples for designers and developers.
Identify gaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities to simplify the system before they become larger problems.
Design foundations for modern workflows, including semantic tokens, system-accurate prototyping, automated documentation, and AI-assisted design and development.
Help teams apply the system to product and marketing experiences without creating one-off solutions that weaken it over time.
Coach designers in component thinking, pattern design, accessibility, and practical application of design-system standards.
Explore tools and workflows that improve team efficiency while protecting quality, accessibility, and brand integrity.
Remain close to the work by taking on difficult design problems and helping bring them through delivery.