At Santander Group, we are on a mission to design and deliver unified, customer-centric experiences that are scalable, efficient, and impactful. As part of our Digital Consumer Bank Global Business, we are aligning local execution with global strategy to deliver best-in-class experiences consistently across markets. We’re looking for a Design System Manager to lead the way in building, scaling, and maintaining our global design system — one that works across brands, channels, and countries. This is the backbone of how Santander delivers consistent, high-quality, and human-centered experiences to millions of customers worldwide. 

Mission:

Lead, scale, and continuously evolve a global design system so it becomes the foundation for delivering consistent, high-quality, and human-centered experiences across brands, channels, and countries. This role ensures that the system is not just a toolkit, but a strategic enabler — aligning global and local teams, fostering collaboration, and embedding governance and processes that allow design to scale with efficiency, flexibility, and impact. By managing the people, structures, and community around the system, the Design System Manager helps Santander Group deliver experiences that are simple, trusted, and cohesive for every customer, everywhere. 

 Key Responsibilities: 

Global Design System: Lead the vision, and evolution of a multi-brand, cross-channel global design system that serves as the foundation for all digital and physical experiences. 

Governance & Operating Model: Establish and manage a global governance framework for the design system, defining roles, responsibilities, and workflows across central and local teams. 

Scalability & Maintenance: Build sustainable processes to scale adoption, ensure quality, and manage updates to the system over time. 

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product, Technology, Brand, and Experience Design teams to ensure the design system is deeply integrated into ways of working and delivers value across the organization. 

Multi-Brand Enablement: Ensure the system can support multiple brands with varying identities, while maintaining a coherent structure and shared components. 

Cross-Channel Coverage: Expand the system beyond digital to include branch, marketing, contact centers, and emerging channels, enabling truly omnichannel experiences. 

Team Leadership: Manage and grow a team of designers, and contributors responsible for building and maintaining the system. 

Community Building: Nurture a global design system community of practice, empowering designers and developers in markets to contribute, learn, and share. 

Advocacy & Communication: Act as the ambassador of the design system, communicating its value and impact internally, and representing Santander in external design and technology forums. 

Measurement & Improvement: Define success metrics (e.g., adoption, efficiency, quality) and use feedback loops to continuously improve the system. 

What we are looking for: 

+10 years of experience in similar functions, with a background on design, or related area. 

Deep expertise in creating and managing complex enterprise-level design systems, ideally across multiple brands and channels. 

Strong understanding of design, front-end development, and accessibility standards. 

Proven experience scaling design systems across geographies and organizations. 

Strong leadership and people management skills, with experience growing and guiding multidisciplinary teams. 

Exceptional ability to collaborate, ensuring alignment between global and local teams. 

Skilled in communication, able to articulate the system’s value to executives, designers, and engineers alike. 

A strategic thinker with a practical, hands-on approach, balancing vision with execution. 

Passionate about design consistency, efficiency, and scalability, while respecting brand and market diversity. 

Highly structured, disciplined, and impact-driven but equally able to enable creativity and flexibility where needed. 

Fluency in English and Spanish (required); additional languages are a plus.

What we offer:

A dynamic, high-impact role shaping the future of designin digital banking. 

Competitive compensation and opportunities for career growth. 

International collaboration and exposure to cutting-edge financial innovation. 

Would you like to grow with us? Join our team! 

Santander is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered as equal without paying attention to gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, age, political orientation, union membership nor disability status. 

We make recruiting decisions based on your experience and skills. We value your passion to discover, invent, simplify, and build.