Design Systems Engineer

Blue Lantern's shared React component library has quietly accumulated three different button implementations across three product teams, and untangling that kind of drift while keeping accessibility intact is the daily reality behind this freelance lead role.

You build and maintain component tooling in React and CSS, extend the Storybook setup so every component ships with documented states and props, and run accessibility checks that catch contrast and keyboard-navigation problems before a component ever reaches a product team. Carrying lead scope also means setting conventions for how new components get proposed and reviewed across teams that do not currently talk to each other much about this.

Required: strong React and CSS fundamentals, hands-on accessibility auditing experience, and comfort maintaining Storybook as a living source of truth rather than a neglected side project. The scope here is lead-level: setting conventions other teams follow, not a specific year count, though several years of production component work is the realistic floor. Visual design skill is not required — a separate design team owns that layer.

The engagement is freelance with flexible hours, based from Lisbon or remote within Europe, billed hourly against agreed milestones. You report to the engineering director sponsoring the initiative and coordinate directly with the teams consuming the library. Component changes now ship behind a documented deprecation path, which is the first thing you will be asked to formalize.