Product Design Manager, Design Systems

Clio is the global leader in legal AI technology, empowering legal professionals and law firms of every size to work smarter, faster, and more securely.

We are transforming the legal experience for all by bettering the lives of legal professionals while increasing access to justice .

Summary:

We're hiring a Product Design Manager to lead Design Systems at Clio. The role is open to candidates across Canada (excluding Quebec) and the US. If you are located near one of our hubs (Burnaby, Calgary or Toronto), you'll be expected to be in the office at least twice a week on our Anchor Days.

Design is one of the three pillars of Clio's R&D organization, alongside Product and Engineering. Our designers work closely with customers to understand how they work, and push for high-quality experiences as we change how lawyers and their teams serve their clients and communities.

About the role

Design work at Clio isn't done only by designers anymore. Product managers, engineers and agents build UI too. Clio AI formulates answers, artifacts, and automations that support workflows and work outputs through plain language requests. Our teams actively prototype in Claude to optimize, iterate, and innovate. Each of these can only produce on-brand, accessible, consistent UI if the design system is written in a form both people and machines can read and interpret well.

As Product Design Manager, Design Systems, you'll lead the team that makes this happen. You'll steer the system's operating model: roadmap, intake, contribution, governance, versioning, and how we measure the system's health across channels. You'll also oversee the onboarding and product-led growth (PLG) patterns that let teams run growth and retention experiments independently.

This is a hands-on, player-coach leadership role. You'll be as comfortable reviewing token architecture and component APIs with Platform Engineering as you are discussing brand expression and copywriting with Brand Marketing. You'll lead the team, and you'll also do the work yourself when it matters most.

You'll report to the Platform Product Design Director, and manage a team of Design Systems and PLG designers.

What you'll do

• •Operating model and governance: Own how the system runs. That covers the roadmap, intake, contribution and review rules, versioning, and health metrics (adoption, coverage, accessibility conformance, and how consistent agent-generated UI is).
• •Agentic-ready foundations: Lead the move from a library people browse to a source of truth that people and agents both use. Tokens, component specs, usage rules and content guidelines are stored as structured data linked to code.
• •AI-native and platform patterns: Work with design teams across Grow, Manage, Work and Enterprise to bring the interaction models and patterns they share into the system, and give them a common foundation for data visualization and charting so customers can focus on insights, not on decoding charts. Also, guide the team on conversational UI, streaming and confidence states, citations, and automation messages (what ran, what needs approval, what failed).
• •Multi-platform system: Extend the system and its governance across Clio's web, mobile, and desktop apps. Shared tokens and foundations flow to every platform, and you'll partner with app teams who build each platform's layer on top of them. The goal is coherence in brand and behaviours, not identical experiences: each platform keeps the interactions its users expect, and customers move between channels without losing their place.
• •Theming and brand: Work with Brand and Marketing on how the system expresses Clio's brand. That includes theming that supports Enterprise white-label experiences, consumer and client portals and experiences, and lets Marketing reuse the system.
• •Hands-on with Platform Engineering: Work directly with front-end platform and DS engineering on token pipelines, component APIs and design–code parity. You should be able to read a pull request, prototype in code, and make technical trade-offs together with engineers.
• •Onboarding and PLG patterns: Oversee a reusable set of onboarding, trial, upgrade and contextual-growth patterns that product teams can test on their own. Partner with PLG/Growth leads so the system speeds up experiments instead of slowing them down.
• •Roadmap alignment: Line up the system roadmap with Accessibility Conformance (WCAG 2.1 AA, VPAT, Section 508), international launches (France, Italy, Quebec, Spain), SMB, MM, and Enterprise timelines.
• •A customer-centric practice: Build discovery and validation into how patterns get made. That means validating with internal users (designers, engineers and agents) and with customers and consumers, and tracking how patterns perform in production.
• •Team leadership and coaching: Hire, coach and grow your team through clear expectations, feedback on craft and behaviour, and career development. Run critiques, design reviews and discovery workshops that keep quality high and delivery predictable. Shield the team from outside noise and scope creep.
• •AI in how we work: Use AI in your own work and show the team how to use it to speed up exploration, documentation and iteration.

What you bring

• •10+ years of product design experience, including time at a Staff, Principal or Lead level, and 2+ years managing designers or formally leading a design systems team.
• •A track record of building and running a design system at scale. You've owned governance, contribution and versioning across many product teams, not only the component library.
• •Strong UX and visual craft, with deep knowledge of interaction design, information architecture and accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA).
• •Technical fluency. You're comfortable with design tokens, component architecture and front-end code, and you have a real working relationship with platform engineers.
• •Experience working with Brand and Marketing on brand expression, theming or multi-brand systems.
• •Experience designing AI-powered experiences, including patterns for trust, transparency and appropriate user control.
• •Strong product judgment, with the ability to connect system investments to customer and business outcomes (adoption, delivery speed, avoided cost, revenue unblocked).
• •Fluency with modern design, prototyping and AI tools (e.g., Claude, Figma, Cursor).
• •A facilitator who aligns Product, Engineering and Design peers, clarifies the "why" behind decisions, and keeps teams moving through ambiguity.

What we're specifically looking for

• •Experience making a design system machine-readable: structured specs, tokens as data, documentation that agents and LLM tooling can use.
• •Shipped patterns for AI-native experiences such as streaming states, citations, confidence signals, refusals, error recovery, and human-in-the-loop approvals.
• •Experience with localization-ready systems (text expansion, date, number and currency formats, groundwork for right-to-left languages) and with keeping a system coherent across web, mobile and desktop.
• •Experience designing or overseeing onboarding, trial and upgrade patterns in a product-led growth motion.

Bonus if you have…

• •A background in content design, or experience writing voice and tone standards that work at the system level.
• •Experience delivering accessibility conformance through a design system.
• •Experience bringing acquired products onto a shared system.

This role is a backfill for an existing position. What you will find here:

Compensation is one of the main components of Clio’s Total Rewards Program. We have developed a series of programs and processes to ensure we are creating fair and competitive pay practices that form the foundation of our human and high-performing culture.

Some highlights of our Total Rewards program include:

• •Competitive, equitable salary with top-tier health benefits, dental, and vision insurance
• •Hybrid work environment, with expectation for local Clions to be in offi