About the Role
- The Design Foundations team brings together Nexus — a multi-brand design platform and system — alongside Content Design and GenAI Design to shape how design, engineering, and product scale across a complex, distributed organization.
- This role focuses on defining the future foundations that enable teams to move faster while delivering cohesive, high-quality experiences.
- Nexus is a strategic platform that accelerates product development, improves experience quality, and aligns multiple brands and teams around shared principles, tools, and standards.
- You will operate at the intersection of design, engineering, and product leadership — shaping governance models, defining operating frameworks, and driving adoption strategies that empower teams while maintaining coherence across the ecosystem.
- Success in this role requires strong organizational leadership, a platform mindset, and the ability to align diverse stakeholders around a shared vision scalable design foundations. This role is based in Portugal.
- Remote work within Portugal is possible; however, you must be based in and legally eligible to work here.
- Remote work from outside Portugal is not possible.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead Nexus as a strategic design platform.
- Define and evolve the vision, strategy and roadmap for Nexus as shared UX infrastructure.
- Treat the design system as an internal product with clear users, priorities, measurable outcomes.
- Balance consistency, flexibility, and scalability across multiple brands and product areas.
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of designers focused on building and evolving Nexus.
- Set a high bar for design quality, systems thinking, and collaboration with engineering.
- Create clarity of roles, priorities, and ways of working within the team.
- Foster a strong culture of ownership, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
- Ensure the team operates with a platform mindset, focused on adoption, scalability, and impact.
- ownership models, contribution workflows, and decision-making frameworks.
- Create predictable processes that enable distributed teams to contribute and adopt Nexus effectively.
- Build governance structures that scale without slowing teams down.
- Partner closely with engineering leadership to align on architecture, tooling, and delivery workflows.
- Ensure Nexus integrates seamlessly into development pipelines and supports engineering velocity.
- Advocate for platform thinking and shared infrastructure across design and engineering.
- Engage designers, engineers, and product teams as active participants in shaping Nexus.
- Build strong internal communities and contribution models.
- Drive adoption through clear value, usability, and collaboration rather than mandate.
- Enable faster development through reusable foundations, tokens, components, and patterns.
- Improve design quality and consistency without creating rigidity.
- Measure and demonstrate the impact of Nexus on speed, scalability, and user experience.
- Align senior stakeholders across design, engineering, and product leadership.
- Operate effectively in ambiguity, creating clarity and direction where needed.
- Champion platform thinking and elevate design as a strategic partner.
What You'll Bring
Proven experience building and scaling design platforms.
Experience leading the creation and evolution of design systems or design platforms in complex organizations.
Experience supporting multiple brands, products, or distributed teams.
Strong governance mindset regarding ownership models, contribution flows, and decision frameworks.
Deep collaboration with engineering teams on platform initiatives.
Understanding of technical implementation (tokens, versioning, component architecture, and release processes).
Ability to speak both design and engineering languages.
Experience driving adoption and organizational change at scale.
Comfort operating in ambiguity and defining structure where none exists.
Pragmatic systems thinking that balances consistency with flexibility.
Optimization for adoption and velocity rather than perfection.
Understanding of trade-offs required to scale effectively.
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits, including health insurance and a bonus scheme.
- Learning & Development budget and structured growth support.
- Flexibility in how and where you work.
- The chance to shape a strategic area of OLX’s customer experience with a talented, ambitious team.
- A strong international community of designers and design leaders to learn from and collaborate with.
- Space to grow your strategic and leadership skills while staying close to the craft.
About OLX
- OLX builds marketplace sustainable ecosystems that millions of people depend on every month to buy and sell cars, find homes, land jobs, and trade secondhand goods.
- The company culture is built on courage to innovate, commitment to outcomes, collaboration across 50+ nationalities and 7 markets, and a customer-led approach.
- Brands include AutoTrader, OLX, Otomoto, Property24, and more.
- The company backed by Prosus, one of the world's largest tech investors.