KAYAK

Design Foundations & Operations Specialist

KAYAK

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Berlin • Germany

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About the role

  • Coordinate design-to-engineering handoffs for foundations work. Ensure what gets designed moves into implementation, flag when things stall, and maintain a shared understanding of timelines and dependencies.
  • Run and evolve contribution workflows — the processes that let product designers across the company adopt, use, and contribute to the design system. This includes onboarding, enablement sessions, office hours, and regular communication about what's changed and why.
  • Maintain and publish quality metrics: component parity across platforms, adoption rates, deviation tracking. Make the team's measurement framework operational and current.
  • Support the team's visual foundations work (icons, illustrations, assets) through governance, review, and hands-on contribution where needed. Ensure visual work meets the quality bar and integrates into existing libraries.
  • Partner with design systems leads and design language leadership on translating brand direction into systematic, reusable guidance that product teams can apply.
  • Support the definition and management of design tokens (color, typography, spacing, radius, motion) across brands and platforms.
  • Work across product pods, brand partners, and engineering to align on how foundations work is prioritized, delivered, and adopted.
  • Use AI tools to accelerate exploration, improve how assets move from design to implementation, and support the team's efforts to make the system ready for AI-assisted design workflows. We expect you to actively build and refine these workflows.

Requirements

  • 5+ years of experience in a product design organization, with significant time spent in or closely alongside design systems work.
  • Experience coordinating delivery across teams and stakeholders — tracking projects, managing handoffs, and keeping work moving without formal authority over everyone involved.
  • Real design systems fluency. You understand how token architectures work, how component libraries are structured, how Figma libraries scale, and how design decisions map to code. Not conceptually. In practice.
  • Experience running contribution or adoption workflows — getting other designers to use and contribute to shared systems, and iterating on the process based on what works.
  • Strong Figma proficiency, including components, properties, variables, and library architecture.
  • Visual judgment. You can review design work and articulate whether it meets the bar in terms of consistency, brand alignment, and system coherence.
  • Comfort with measurement: tracking adoption, maintaining scorecards, and communicating progress to stakeholders.
  • Comfort collaborating with engineers and front-end workflows like Storybook, GitHub, and component handoff tools.
  • Hands-on experience using AI tools in your design workflow.
  • A self-driven, autonomous approach. You pick up work and drive it forward without needing everything scoped in advance.
  • A proactive and inquisitive mindset. You spot gaps, ask questions, and propose solutions rather than waiting for direction.
Benefits
  • 6 weeks of paid vacation
  • Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
  • Focus on mental health and well-being:
  • Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
  • Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
  • Company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)
  • No meeting Fridays
  • Paid parental leave
  • Paid volunteer time
  • Focus on your career growth:
  • Development Dollars
  • Leadership development
  • Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
  • Travel Discounts
  • Employee Resource Groups
  • Free lunch 2 days per week
  • Pension plan contributions
  • Public transportation subsidies
  • Bike leasing program
  • Monthly social events, massages, Thursday happy hours, sports teams
  • An awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
design systemstoken architecturescomponent librariesFigmaadoption workflowsvisual judgmentmeasurement trackingAI toolsfront-end workflowscomponent handoff
Soft Skills
self-drivenautonomousproactiveinquisitivecollaborationcommunicationproject managementproblem-solvingstakeholder managementdesign critique