( Long story short )
When I found design systems work, everything connected. The discipline reaches across the whole design and engineering org, from visual craft and information architecture to governance, engineering integration, and adoption. The mix of skills I'd been collecting for years stopped feeling scattered and started looking like the toolkit for one specific kind of work.
What's kept me in it is the scale of the problem space. The work feels like solving a living rubik's cube. Change one token and it cascades through every consumer; restructure one collection and three other architectural problems suddenly become solvable. The reach is the draw: your work doesn't ship to one screen or one product, it shows up everywhere across the org at once. Getting all of it to cohere under one shared system is the part I like most.
For the last five years I've done this work at Fortune 500 scale. I'm currently at PayPal, where I own the Venmo.com domain of the Paypal.com design system, a multi-brand library that governs three brands across 70+ consuming Figma teams. I'm strongest at the architectural and operational layers: token models, multi-brand scaling, migration of legacy systems to modern foundations, and the contribution and intake practices that keep a system healthy after launch. I work closely with engineering through GitHub and Storybook, and AI is part of the daily practice: I use Claude Code across token-repo work, prototyping, and QA, with Figma agents for system-wide maintenance.The best way to reach me is by email or LinkedIn.
romanismagilov1005@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/romanismagilov
