Location
London, hybrid working with onsite presence at Bracken House near St Paul's.

Hours
Full Time, 12-month fixed-term contract covering maternity leave.

Salary
Competitive salary (not specified).

About the Role
The Financial Times is a globally recognised news organisation known for its authority, integrity and accuracy. We are seeking a Product Designer to join our Design Systems team on a 12-month fixed-term contract. Based at our iconic Bracken House in London, you will play a key role in evolving Origami, the FT's design system, helping teams design and build with greater consistency, quality and pace across web and mobile platforms. This role involves working on reusable principles, patterns, foundations, components and libraries that support product delivery across the FT, spanning iOS, Android and web in a hybrid environment.

You will collaborate closely with product designers, engineers, product managers, and Brand and Editorial Design teams to ensure alignment across foundational styles and journalistic layouts. Working within a federated contribution model, you will help teams contribute to, adopt and evolve the system over time. Accessibility is fundamental, and you will ensure patterns, components and guidance meet high accessibility standards from the outset.

Key responsibilities include designing and evolving reusable components and patterns, supporting hybrid web and mobile environments, identifying opportunities for system improvements, creating clear documentation and specifications using tools like Figma and Zeroheight, collaborating with engineers to ensure feasible and scalable solutions, supporting contribution and governance processes, and maintaining high standards of accessibility, craft and coherence. You will also explore and apply AI-assisted tooling to support prototyping, component definition and documentation, contributing to making Origami usable within AI-assisted workflows.

This role offers the opportunity to contribute to a premium, coherent FT product experience while developing your design systems practice within an established and evolving team.

Experience
- Strong product design craft across interaction, visual design and prototyping with attention to detail and quality.
- Experience working on or contributing to digital products or design systems, understanding how systems scale across teams and platforms.
- Experience designing across web and mobile, including familiarity with iOS and Android platform conventions and hybrid environments.
- Experience working in Figma, including component libraries, variables, tokens and prototyping.
- Experience creating or contributing to reusable components, patterns or guidance for digital products.
- Experience working closely with engineers to deliver high-quality outcomes.
- Experience working in cross-functional teams within product delivery environments.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.

About you
- Confidence applying accessibility standards in practice.
- Collaborative approach with ability to build relationships across product, engineering, editorial and brand teams.
- Comfortable collaborating through feedback, contribution and shared ways of working.
- Understanding of how individual design decisions contribute to broader system quality, consistency and maintainability.
- Up to date with and interested in how AI is shaping design and development workflows.
- Experience using or exploring AI-assisted tools and interest in applying AI practically to improve speed, quality and consistency.

Qualifications
- A portfolio demonstrating strong product and systems thinking with evidence of meaningful impact.
- Working understanding of HTML, CSS and accessible, semantic markup.
- Interest in systems thinking, accessibility and emerging tooling.
- Experience or interest in AI-assisted design or development workflows is a plus.