Senior Design Technologist, Design Systems, CNN

We are seeking a Design Technologist who operates at the intersection of design, engineering, and emerging AI capabilities. This role is responsible for translating design intent into scalable, system-driven UI while also identifying how AI can augment, accelerate, and transform design system workflows. 

As a Senior Design Technologist, Design Systems, you are a member of the world-class CNN Digital Product Design Team, which is responsible for creating industry-leading new experiences consumed by millions of audiences across the globe. You are both a builder and a systems thinker, someone who not only built and maintained design systems, but also understands how to apply AI across design and development processes (e.g., token generation, component scaffolding, content generation, and workflow automation). 

The Vossi Design System team is responsible for building and maintaining CNN’s multi-platform design system. This is an incredible opportunity to envision and implement a world-class, scalable design system. 

The Senior Design Technologist is a talented designer & design engineer who enjoys collaborating with product, engineering, research, editorial, analytics, content strategy and other designers to build and grow reusable libraries that supports speed and innovation towards a stellar end user experience. In this role, you will have the opportunity to impact the entirety of CNN’s digital experience, and at the same time impact CNN’s bottom line. 

Your Role Accountabilities...  

• AI Integration in Design Workflows 

• Bridge Design, Engineering, and AI 

• Help teams understand feasibility, constraints, and ethical considerations of AI-powered features 

• Advocate for high-quality UX in AI-assisted or AI-generated interfaces 

• Identify and implement opportunities to integrate AI into design system workflows, such as: 

• Generating or maintaining design tokens (color, spacing, typography) programmatically 

• Automating component creation, documentation, or testing 

• Assisting with layout generation, content population, or variant exploration 

• Ensure design system artifacts are consumable by AI models, MCPs or other AI-powered tools 

• Collaborate with data/ML teams when needed to integrate intelligent or adaptive UI behaviors 

• Design System Engineering 

• Build and maintain scalable, reusable UI components aligned with design tokens and system architecture 

• Ensure consistency between design artifacts (e.g., Figma) and production code 

• Contribute to system documentation, usage guidelines, and governance models 

• Partner with engineering to ensure performant, accessible implementations 

• Enable and empower feature teams to collaborate and contribute on design system enhancements 

• Tooling & Workflow Innovation 

• Develop internal tools, scripts, plugins, or pipelines to improve efficiency across design and engineering 

• Optimize design-to-code workflows using automation and AI augmentation 

• Contribute to experimentation frameworks that enable rapid testing of new ideas 

• Quality, Accessibility & Responsible AI 

• Ensure pixel accuracy, responsiveness, and performance across UI implementations 

• Champion accessibility (WCAG) and inclusive design practices 

• Advocate for responsible AI usage, including transparency, bias mitigation, and user trust 

• Conduct audits of both UI quality and AI-assisted outputs 

Qualifications & Experience...

• 6+ years in a relevant role such as a design technologist, UX/UI engineer, or product designer. 

• Enterprise, platforms and/or internal tools experience preferred. 

• Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI into the design workflow to test ideas more efficiently and communicate solutions with greater speed and clarity 

• Expert proficiency with Figma 124.4+ including variable maintenance, components, styles, and shared libraries 

• Experience creating and maintaining component libraries 

• Strong front-end development skills in a major framework (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) 

• Deep understanding of design systems, component architecture, and design tokens 

• Proficiency using an IDE (such as Cursor or Claude) 

• Solid grounding in interaction design, visual design, and UX principles 

• Familiarity with current AI capabilities (e.g., generative AI, LLMs, multimodal systems) 

• Understanding of prompt design, structured outputs, or API-based AI integrations 

• Ability to evaluate AI outputs for quality, bias, and usability 

• Strong verbal and written communication skills and experience collaborating with cross-functional partners such as Engineering, Program management, and Product management