Sara Alba-Design Systems Architect · Design Engineer

Sole owner of the design system for an enterprise corporate-decarbonisation platform; the role was created on joining. I own design intent, tokens, component contracts, documentation and governance — engineering owns implementation.

• Established design system practice where none existed: token architecture, component specifications, audits, documentation and governance, in an organisation that had shipped for years without a design team.
• Rebuilt the design-side source of truth — replaced an undocumented, individually modified purchased kit with a clean component library and rebranded theme, and mirrored code components into design so both layers finally describe the same product.
• Consolidated overlapping legacy components into single contract-driven components, replacing configuration sprawl with intent expressed at the type level.
• Audited the system quantitatively — token counts, adoption ratios, override density, local-component proliferation — converting "the system isn't working" into figures engineering could not dispute.
• Authored the proposal to migrate off Material UI onto owned, standards-based foundations: headless primitives, plain CSS with custom properties, W3C-format design tokens and a documented component library — scoped as a staged pilot on the highest-friction component to prove the model without functional risk.
• Built and presented the case to executive stakeholders, including direct answers to the objections raised by the specialists most invested in the existing stack.

• Designed and implemented digital experiences for web and mobile products.
• Built and maintained design systems and style guides.
• Developed front-end interfaces in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

• Designed and built websites and digital products across marketing and product teams.
• Established scalable design foundations and style systems.
• Ran user testing and fed the findings back into the interface.