Senior UI Engineer - Design Systems Team Lead

Join Barclays as a Senior UI Engineer - Design Systems Team Lead on our Digital Experience Platform team. You will play a pivotal role in building the foundational component library and design system that powers our next-generation digital experiences. This role offers you the opportunity to shape how teams across the organisation build user interfaces, establishing patterns and tools that drive consistency, accessibility, and engineering velocity. Leading a talented team of engineers, you will set technical direction while remaining hands-on, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and collaboration at the core of everything we do.

To be successful as a Senior UI Engineer - Design Systems Team Lead, you should have:

• Proven experience leading and developing engineering teams, with a track record of mentoring engineers and building high-performing, collaborative teams
• Strong proficiency in React and TypeScript, with demonstrable experience building component libraries or design systems at scale
• Deep understanding of modern CSS, including CSS custom properties, CSS-in-JS solutions, and utility-first frameworks like Tailwind CSS
• Experience with design tokens and the tooling that transforms them across platforms (e.g., Style Dictionary, Token Studio)
• Solid understanding of web accessibility standards and experience implementing ARIA patterns, keyboard navigation, and inclusive design practices
• Experience with component documentation tools such as Storybook, including writing stories, documentation, and visual tests
• Familiarity with modern build tools and package management for library development (Vite, Rollup, npm/pnpm workspaces)
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence technical direction and advocate for design system adoption

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Experience with Vue.js or other modern frontend frameworks, demonstrating adaptability and breadth across technologies
• Knowledge of animation libraries and micro-interaction implementation for polished user experiences
• Experience with monorepo tooling (Nx, Turborepo) and CI/CD pipelines for component libraries
• Understanding of semantic versioning, changelog management, and library release processes
• Contributions to open-source design systems or component libraries
• Experience with Figma plugin development or design-to-code tooling
• Background in establishing engineering standards, code review practices, and technical documentation

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role will be based in our Prague office.

Purpose of the role

To design, develop and improve software, utilising various engineering methodologies, that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for our customers and colleagues. 

Accountabilities

• Leadership and development of a team of UI engineers, defining roles and responsibilities, providing mentorship, and fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Architectural ownership of a comprehensive React-based component library following modern design system principles, ensuring components are accessible, performant, and thoroughly documented.
• Strategic collaboration with designers to translate design tokens, specifications, and interaction patterns into reusable, production-ready components that maintain design fidelity across applications.
• Creation and maintenance of tooling, documentation, and developer experience improvements that enable engineering teams to efficiently adopt and contribute to the design system.
• Cross-functional partnership with product managers, designers, and platform engineers to define component APIs, establish patterns, and align the design system roadmap with business objectives.
• Implementation of comprehensive testing strategies including unit tests, visual regression tests, and accessibility audits to ensure component quality and reliability across the library.
• Championing of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) and inclusive design principles, ensuring accessibility is a core quality attribute embedded in team practices and all components.
• Contribution to strategic architectural decisions, build pipelines, and release processes that support a scalable, versioned component library consumed across multiple applications.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.