Principal Designer
The design choices made at the system level right now will shape what every product tribe at Mews can build for years. This role owns that layer: the design system, cross-tribe agents and skills, research engines, and the architectural standards that make coherent design possible at scale across a division moving fast in multiple directions simultaneously.
Most Principal Designers sit inside a tribe and own a product surface. This one sits above all of them and owns the foundation they run on. The opportunity is to build something that outlasts any single project or initiative, at a point in the hospitality industry where the decisions made now genuinely matter.
What you would do
Build and maintain the design foundation across the division: the design system, cross-tribe agents and skills, research and discovery engines, design architecture, guidelines, and standards
Hold the multi-year view — write clearly about what design across the division will need that it doesn't yet have, and drive toward it with enough conviction to see it through
Build AI-powered agents, skills, and tooling that encode design judgment into reusable systems rather than one-off artifacts tied to a single project
Work with Staff Designers so that tribe-level design substrates compose into a coherent whole rather than a collection of parallel efforts
Partner with the VP on the most complex cross-tribe design problems — the ones that don't fit inside any single tribe's scope
Contribute craft feedback and calibration input into Director and Staff Designer performance reviews
AI Fluency Level 4: In this role, that means you've shipped AI-powered systems, not just integrated AI into your own workflow. You'll be responsible for building the agentic design tooling and AI skills that the entire design division runs on — agents that encode judgment, research engines that scale discovery, and systems that other designers use without necessarily knowing you built them. You understand the underlying components well enough to make real architectural decisions about them.
For more information on AI fluency at Mews, please refer to "AI Fluency at Mews: A Comprehensive Guide for Candidates" on Confluence.
What you would bring
A body of shipped, high-quality design work and demonstrable taste — senior enough to be credible across multiple tribes without needing to prove it
Multi-year thinking and the ability to encode it into systems and agents that outlast any single initiative
Genuine satisfaction in cross-tribe substrate work — the problems that don't carry a team's name on them
AI Fluency Level 4 or the equivalent: you've built AI-powered products or systems, understand the components well enough to make architectural decisions about them, and have shipped something where AI is a core part of what it does
Ability to operate as a multiplier for a VP without the title or formal authority that typically comes with that level of influence
Nice to have
Experience maintaining a design system used across multiple product teams at significant scale
Familiarity with agentic design tooling or building AI skills and research engines
Spain
€79.000—€121.000 EUR
Czechia
1 491 000 Kč—2 005 000 Kč CZK
UK
£81,000—£106,000 GBP
United States
$157,000—$202,000 USD
Ireland
€91.000—€117.000 EUR