Staff Design Systems Designer

Ethos Life

7h•$126,000 - $224,000•Remote

About The Position

We’re looking for Ethos’ first Design Systems Designer to build and evolve the design system that powers our customer and internal experiences. This is a true 0→1 opportunity. Ethos is not yet “design-system mature,” and that’s exactly why this role matters: you’ll help bring structure to how we design and build UI, without slowing down product teams or over-engineering processes. You’ll partner closely with Product Design, Engineering, Brand/Creative, and Content Design to create a system that helps teams move faster while improving consistency, accessibility, quality, and trust. This role is a blend of strategy and hands-on execution. You’ll define what the system is, build it in Figma, help translate it into production-ready components and tokens with engineering, and set the operating model that keeps it healthy as Ethos scales into its next chapter.

Requirements

7+ years of relevant experience, with a track record of setting system strategy, driving cross-team adoption, and raising the bar for design quality across an organization.
Strong product design foundation with excellent visual and interaction craft — you care deeply about details and can scale that quality through systems.
Hands-on experience building and maintaining design systems in Figma, including component architecture, documentation, and scalable patterns.
Strong working fluency with modern front-end concepts (tokens, components, states, responsive behavior). You don’t need to be an engineer, but you can collaborate closely with engineering and understand tradeoffs.
Experience setting accessibility standards and shipping accessible components (WCAG-informed practices, inclusive design thinking).
Ability to thrive in ambiguity and build structure where it doesn’t yet exist — you’re pragmatic, opinionated, and iterative.
Clear communicator who can align diverse stakeholders and influence without relying on formal authority.
A portfolio that demonstrates end-to-end design system thinking and real-world impact (adoption, quality, speed, consistency).

Nice To Haves

Experience building design tokens pipelines and/or working with tooling like Storybook or similar component documentation environments preferred.
Experience with video, motion, illustration/iconography, tone preferred.

Responsibilities

Establish the vision, principles, and roadmap for Ethos’ design system — balancing long-term scalability with near-term product needs.
Audit the current system, product UI and identify the highest-leverage opportunities to standardize patterns and reduce inconsistency.
Define a scalable token strategy (color, typography, spacing, elevation, motion, etc.) and a clear approach to theming and brand expression across products.
Design, build, and maintain Figma libraries (components, styles/variables, templates, and patterns) that product teams can confidently use.
Create high-quality component specifications with clear interaction behavior, states, responsive guidance, and accessibility considerations (focus, keyboard, contrast, error handling, etc.).
Ensure the system supports narrative, conversion-driven experiences (e.g., discovery flows, applications, underwriting moments, onboarding, policy management, lifecycle touchpoints).
Partner with Design System / Front-End engineers to translate the system into reusable code components and tokens (and help define component APIs that work for product teams).
Align on workflows that keep design and code in sync (component lifecycle, versioning, release notes, deprecations).
Drive pragmatic adoption: start where it matters most, ship iteratively, and build credibility through visible product impact.
Build documentation that is actually used: guidelines, do/don’t examples, usage rationale, and decision records.
Coach and enable partner teams (Product Design, Engineering, PM) on how to use the system effectively and when to extend it.
Create a lightweight contribution process that enables product designers and engineers to propose, review, and add to the system.
Define what success looks like and track meaningful signals (adoption, UI consistency, reduced design/development time, accessibility improvements, fewer regressions).
Partner with Research and Data teams where useful to connect system changes to outcomes (quality, user confidence, conversion efficiency).