UX/UI - Team Lead

Description

Job Summary: The UX/UI Team Lead ensures quality and consistency in the design team's deliverables within an AI-assisted working mode, combining design leadership, leading the transition to AI, product vision, and team management. Key Highlights: 1. 100% remote work with flexibility and autonomy. 2. Experienced, cohesive functional team with a voice in the product. 3. Challenging projects with real impact in a rapidly evolving sector. Innovation Makers (INM) is a digital product consultancy specializing in digital banking solutions for the Lusophone African market. We simultaneously support multiple products for clients such as BAI (Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, Customer Portal, CMS, among others), with a Design System comprising 1,500+ design tokens and 100+ components in Figma-to-code parity (Vue 3). The UX/Design team is transitioning to an AI-assisted working mode, structured around an internal proprietary methodology (Lumen), where AI serves as the execution engine across the entire pipeline, while human judgment remains the layer ensuring quality. This methodology is internal: candidates are not expected to know it beforehand — it is learned during onboarding, and the Team Lead is expected to operate and help evolve it. It is precisely within this context that the intersection of UX × Front-End × AI becomes central. In an ecosystem where the Design System generates real code and AI produces both interfaces and implementation, the leader must exercise sound judgment on both sides — assessing whether the output (both design and front-end) is robust, not merely plausible. **Position:** ---------- **FUNCTION MISSION** The UX/UI Team Lead ensures the design team delivers with quality and consistency in an AI-assisted working mode, without compromising rigor, consistency, or compliance due to acceleration. This role integrates four dimensions: * Design leadership at the UX × Frontend intersection: maintaining high quality standards for both design and its product-level implementation, and rigorously evaluating outputs — both design and front-end — generated by AI-assisted workflows. * Leading the transition to AI-assisted design: bringing deep, hands-on AI expertise to operate and deepen internal workflows, orchestrating the team’s AI tools, and preserving human judgment as the key differentiator at every stage. * Product vision: contributing to product creation and evolution — framing the right problems and connecting design to business outcomes and user value. * Team management and development: leading designers through methodological change, developing individuals, and sustaining a high-bar culture of constructive critique. **Responsibilities** **Design and Implementation Quality (Product)** * Maintaining high quality standards over the team’s design output — flows, screens, and user journeys — rejecting outputs that appear polished but contain subtle flaws. * Reviewing front-end implementation of features produced by the team (including AI-generated output), ensuring faithful realization of intended designs and technical soundness. * Arbitrating design and interaction decisions within the team’s product scope, escalating to the Design System Lead all matters affecting Design System architecture or governance. * Ensuring correct and consistent adoption of the Design System by the team, and channeling component needs and gaps to the Design System Lead. * Ensuring the team’s designs meet regulatory requirements at the experience level, in coordination with the Design System Lead — who ensures compliance at the component and system levels. **Method Transition and Evolution** * Operating the internal AI-assisted design methodology daily (post-onboarding) and identifying where workflows fail in real projects, closing those gaps. * Orchestrating the team’s AI tools (integrated assistants, MCP for Figma and documentation), pragmatically — knowing when and when not to apply them. * Deepening and documenting reliable AI-integrated workflows, rather than ad-hoc usage. **Team Leadership and Development** * Leading the UX/Design team: setting objectives, performance tracking, and professional development. * Conducting regular 1:1s, delivering continuous feedback, and managing identity-related anxiety triggered by the AI transition. * Managing capacity, balancing reactive work (project deliveries) and proactive work (method and system evolution). * Participating in recruitment and onboarding of new team members. **Facilitation, Alignment, and Communication** * Facilitating discovery, framing, and validation sessions and workshops, including alignment with Functional Analysis teams during joint sessions. * Acting as the interface with front-end developers, analysts, and project managers, and managing relationships with banking stakeholders. * Documenting decisions, rationale, and usage guidelines. **Requirements:** --------------- **Required Profile** **Technical Competencies** These first three are co-equal and non-negotiable — the core of the profile lies precisely at the intersection of UX × Front-End × AI. * UX/UI: solid product design craft — interaction design, flows, and patterns. * Frontend: sufficient knowledge to reason about component architecture, read and review code (Vue 3 preferred), ensure Figma-to-code parity, and collaborate as an equal peer with developers. Technical leadership level; autonomous production development is not expected. * AI-assisted design — proven and in-depth: demonstrable experience (portfolio or concrete cases) designing and leading end-to-end AI-assisted design and implementation workflows — tool orchestration, prompt/context engineering, integration via MCP — and mature judgment of AI output on both sides (design and code). Real practice, not occasional use; pragmatism, not evangelism. * Systems thinking and fluency in the Design System: proficient use of the Design System and its tokens, anticipating the impact of a design decision across multiple products. **Strategic Product Capability** * Product thinking: framing the right problems and linking design decisions to business outcomes and user value, not merely executing requests. Creation (0*1): demonstrated ability to shape new products and features from ambiguous contexts — discovery, hypothesis definition, and vision. * Evolution: iteratively growing existing products, prioritizing by impact and deciding based on data and feedback. **Management and Leadership Competencies** * People management experience: 1:1s, feedback, career development, and performance management. * Change leadership: having led an existing team through a methodological or tooling shift without disrupting ongoing delivery. * Workshop facilitation and group dynamics. * Autonomy to make technical design decisions and defend them with clear rationale. * Communication with diverse audiences: designers, developers, project managers, and business stakeholders. **Additional Assets** * Experience in digital banking, fintech, or regulated products. * Experience building or evolving a Design System at the system level (not just consumption). Familiarity with code-design bridge tooling (Code Connect, Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio) or automated token pipelines. * History of designing or evolving a design process/methodology — not merely following one. * Fluent European Portuguese; professional English. **Tools and Ecosystem** * Design: Figma (components, variables, prototyping) * Frontend: Vue 3 (reading and reviewing; autonomous development is not expected) * Management: Asana (backlog) and Notion (project documentation) * AI: Claude, integrated into team workflows (Claude Projects, MCP for Figma and Notion) and the internal Lumen methodology * Version control: Git (DS and product repositories) **Other Information:** ----------------------- **What We Offer:** * 100% remote work with flexibility and autonomy. * Experienced, cohesive functional team with a voice in the product. * Challenging projects with real impact in a rapidly evolving sector. * Relaxed environment, free of office politics, focused on delivering value. * Culture of mutual support, continuous improvement, and respect for people’s time. **Why Innovation Makers?** INM is a Portuguese company specialized in developing and implementing software solutions, with increasing focus on the financial domain. Our core competencies lie in Middleware, Mobile, UI/UX, and Web Design & Development. We are a company that values teamwork, initiative, and encourage every member to contribute and freely express their ideas for the projects we create. Our primary objective is delivering solutions that provide value to our clients’ businesses and to the end users of the solutions we build; to achieve this, we work every day to ensure everyone collaborating with us has the best possible conditions to succeed. **If you believe you possess the skills we seek, submit your application.**