(LONG STORY SHORT)
When I encountered design systems work, everything connected. The discipline touches every part of the design and engineering organization: visual craft, information architecture, governance, engineering integration, cross-team coordination, adoption strategy. The skills I'd been collecting weren't disparate anymore — they were the toolkit for this specific kind of work.
What kept me here is the scale of the problem space. Design systems work feels like solving a living, thinking 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 what makes it genuinely interesting — your work doesn't ship to one screen or one product, it shows up everywhere across the org. When the pieces fit together under one shared system, it's quite something to see.
For the last five years I've focused on this work at Fortune 500 scale — currently at PayPal, where I co-lead a multi-brand library spanning five brands and 70+ consuming Figma teams, and previously across senior contract engagements at Google Nest, DirecTV, Verizon, and Cigna. I'm best 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 systems healthy after launch. I work closely with engineering through GitHub and Storybook, and I've been leaning on Claude Code and Figma Make to accelerate the work where it makes sense.
If you'd like to get in touch, the best way to reach me is by email or LinkedIn.
romanismagilov1005@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/romanismagilov
