Staff Design Systems Designer

Role: Staff Design Systems Designer

Ethos is seeking its first Design Systems Designer to build and evolve the company’s design system—a true 0→1 opportunity to bring structure and consistency to product UI without slowing teams down.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Foundations

• Establish the design system vision, principles, and roadmap, balancing scalability with near-term product needs.
• Audit the current UI and identify highest-leverage areas to standardize patterns and reduce inconsistency.
• Define a scalable token strategy (e.g., color, typography, spacing, elevation, motion) and an approach to theming/brand expression across products.

System Design & Craft

• Design, build, and maintain Figma libraries (components, styles/variables, templates, patterns).
• Produce component specifications including interaction behavior, states, responsive guidance, and accessibility considerations (focus, keyboard support, contrast, error handling, etc.).
• Ensure the system supports narrative, conversion-focused experiences (e.g., discovery flows, applications, underwriting, onboarding, policy management, lifecycle touchpoints).

Engineering Partnership

• Partner with Design System and Front-End engineers to translate the system into reusable code components and tokens.
• Help define component APIs for product teams.
• Align on workflows to keep design and code in sync (lifecycle, versioning, release notes, deprecations).
• Drive pragmatic adoption: prioritize high-impact areas, ship iteratively, and build credibility through visible product outcomes.

Governance, Adoption & Enablement

• Create and maintain documentation to drive adoption (details cut off in the provided text).

Requirements

• Strong design systems experience, including both strategy and hands-on execution.
• Expertise creating Figma libraries and component specifications with accessibility and interaction details.
• Ability to collaborate closely with product design and engineering to operationalize design tokens and reusable components.
• Experience thinking about conversion-driven and narrative user experiences.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working in regulated, decision-heavy domains where trust, quality, and accessibility are critical.