Design System Engineer (12-month FTC)

At loveholidays - we trailblaze together. We're on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers' unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next getaway. Our team is the driving force behind our role as our customers' personal holiday expert - the smart way to get away.

Technology at loveholidays underpins our vision to become the global leader in packaged holidays. We drive cutting-edge innovation and technical excellence to futureproof the business. Our systems process trillions of daily holiday offers, we deploy over a thousand times a month, serving thousands of requests per second. This is where you can accelerate your growth by solving complex challenges and broadening your skillset.

Join us to create impact for our future in an exciting new chapter, owning your success and contributing to shared goals. We actively talk about technology and adhere to our key technology principles that have guided us this far. We are growing and have ambitious plans to expand across Europe, employing the best minds and technology to let us do this.

About the team

Our product teams work across the customer journey to unlock opportunities that enable commercial growth and build value for our customers. In order to maximise the impact of these teams we need to further invest in our design system to enhance its potential as a platform for growth. We are evolving our ways of working and investing heavily in AI. This makes it a critical period for our design system to mature into the intelligence layer we need it to be to drive quality output and outcomes, helping us realise our ambition of becoming the global leader in packaged holidays.

The impact you'll have:

As Design System Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in elevating product quality and consistency across loveholidays' customer-facing experience. Working with design and tech leaders you'll own the evolution of our design system - bridging design intent and frontend implementation - while helping our teams move faster and ship more consistently, especially as AI-assisted development becomes central to how we build.

This is a rare opportunity to shape the visual and interactive foundation of a product used by millions of travellers, working at the intersection of design craft, frontend engineering, and developer experience.

Additional Info: This role is a 12-month FTC contract

Your day-to-day:

• Operationalise the design system - co-lead its evolution and governance, build and maintain a robust component library in React/TypeScript, and establish clear adoption standards across product teams - enabling the operational loop between Figma, code, and multi-brand delivery
• Enable AI-assisted development - help define how our design system supports AI-generated frontend code (Claude Code, Cursor and similar tooling), reducing rework and improving consistency of AI output, whilst enabling innovation and experimentation at scale
• Bridge design and engineering - work closely with product designers and engineers to translate design decisions into reusable, production-ready components
• Raise the quality bar - review design system features before release to ensure they meet high UX and consistency standards; make targeted visual and interaction refinements aligned with design system guidelines
• Improve developer experience - partner with engineers to make the system intuitive to use, well-documented, and a genuine accelerant
• Cross-functional alignment - collaborate with design leadership, product managers, and engineering to ensure the system reflects evolving product priorities

• Proven experience in design systems work - you've built, maintained, or significantly evolved a component library, token architecture and associated documentation in a production environment, supporting multi-platform delivery (web, iOS, Android)
• Strong frontend engineering skills - you are expert in React, TypeScript, and modern CSS; and experienced with industry-standard documentation tooling
• Design sensibility - you can make considered visual and interaction decisions, not just translate specs into code
• Systems thinker - you understand governance, versioning, and how to drive adoption across teams without mandating it; you can anticipate the downstream impact of design system choices and validate them at scale
• Experience working alongside AI coding tools - you think critically about how component structure and documented guardrails affect the quality and consistency of AI-generated output
• Data-informed - you use component usage analytics, adoption metrics, research insights, and performance data to guide decisions, not just intuition
• A collaborative and clear communicator - you're as comfortable pairing with a designer on a component spec as reviewing a PR with an engineer, and you write documentation, rationale, and migration guides that engineers and designers can easily consume.
• Deep commitment to web performance - you understand how design system decisions affect Core Web Vitals at scale, and take pride in helping loveholidays remain the fastest in travel
• Deep commitment to accessibility - because opening up travel to everyone isn't a nice-to-have

Your portfolio should contain examples of great work and clearly defined outcomes. It should cover more than just the design visuals and include the process on how you got there and the structure around you that got you there. Desirable: * Knowledge and understanding of the travel sector or other D2C e-commerce environments * Experience building design system foundations that supports multi-brand/white-label architecture and internationalisation at scale Perks of joining us: * Company pension contributions at 5% * Individualised training budget for you to learn on the job and level yourself up * Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends * 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum * Ability to buy and sell annual leave * Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers At loveholidays, we focus on developing an inclusive culture and environment that encourages personal growth and collective success. Each individual offers unique perspectives and ideas that increase the diversity and effectiveness of our teams. And we value the insight and potential you could bring on our continued journey.