Design Systems Lead

nice design jobs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Home-office equipment ordering

Health and wellness stipend

Intra-office travel budget

Weekly coffee stipend

Medical, dental & vision insurance (US

Job summary

Ramp in San Francisco is seeking a Design Systems Lead to build the foundations that ensure Ramp experiences look, feel, and work like Ramp—without a designer driving every decision.

You are a designer first with code depth, shaping typography, hierarchy, motion, and accessibility, and you convert that judgment into reusable patterns, tools, and guidance for the team and builders.

Qualifications

• Experience leading and growing design or design-engineering teams with clear direction.
• Exceptional visual and interaction design, with a strong point of view.
• Deep systems thinking; demonstrated adoption of design systems by other teams.
• Strong technical fluency; able to prototype and discuss front-end tradeoffs with engineers.
• Hands-on use of AI to improve design and building workflows.
• Ability to translate principles into reusable patterns and checks for scale.
• Strong product judgment; close to customer workflows and outcomes.
• Ability to create clarity in ambiguity and maintain momentum without lowering quality.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the design systems team; set priorities, give feedback, and motivate the team.
• Own the system’s vision; decide what to preserve or replace and translate it into focused work.
• Elevate Ramp’s visual/interaction design; raise typography, hierarchy, density, motion, accessibility.
• Make design judgment usable by people and agents through patterns and guidance.
• Guide technical architecture with engineering; balance flexibility, coherence, and performance.
• Stay hands-on; prototype, code, and test ideas to unblock the team.
• Define and measure quality with repeatable evaluations based on real tasks.
• Improve the path from idea to shipped experience with cross-functional collaboration.
• Earn adoption by working with product teams and turning questions into improvements.
• Keep the team moving forward by sharing learnings and adapting as needed.

Skills

Team leadership

Visual design

Systems thinking

Frontend prototyping

AI in design

Design principles

Product judgment

Ambiguity management

Curiosity about AI

Job description

ABOUT RAMP

Ramp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $200B in annualized spend flows in and out of 70,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.

The problems are high-stakes, data-dense, and unforgiving.

We hire people with high agency and high urgency. We look for slope over intercept. We care less about where you trained and more about what you’ve built. At Ramp, everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end and makes consequential decisions that shape the outcome.

The median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year – far in excess of businesses operating without Ramp. We believe every ambitious company deserves the same.

If you want to build systems that directly shape how companies move and manage billions, Ramp is the place to do it.

ABOUT THE ROLE

How we build software is changing. Designers are building tools and agents, prototyping in code, and shipping directly into the product. More people can create software than ever before. That makes design judgment more important, not less.

We’re looking for a Design Systems Lead to build that judgment into the foundations of Ramp.

This is not just about maintaining a component library. It’s about making it possible for designers, engineers, and agents to build experiences that look, feel, and work like Ramp—without a designer driving every decision or the design systems team reviewing every change.

You’re a designer first, with the technical depth to guide architecture and get into the code. You have exceptional taste and strong opinions about typography, hierarchy, interaction, and motion. Just as importantly, you know how to turn that judgment into patterns, tools, and guidance that make everyone else’s work better.

You’re deeply curious about AI and already using it to change how you work. You build, experiment, inspect the results, and push past the demo. You can imagine a different way of building software—and lead a team toward it.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead and develop the design systems team. Set clear priorities, ownership, and goals. Give direct, timely feedback, hold people accountable, and help them do the best work of their careers.
• Own the system’s vision and direction. Decide what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on what builders and customers need. Turn that direction into focused work the team can deliver.
• Elevate Ramp’s visual and interaction design. Raise the bar for typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility, and the states beyond the happy path.
• Make design judgment usable by people and agents. Translate principles into reusable patterns, reference experiences, composition rules, and guidance that produce better work without you in the room.
• Guide technical architecture with engineering. Shape everything from components and tokens to how agents discover guidance, compose interfaces, and check their work. Make sound tradeoffs between flexibility, coherence, performance, and ease of use.
• Stay hands-on. Build prototypes, work in code, and get into implementation details to test ideas, unblock the team, and understand where the system breaks down.
• Define and measure quality. Build repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks. Measure whether builders can ship better work faster, with less rework—not just whether they use the tools.
• Improve the path from idea to shipped experience. Partner with engineering and AI teams on workflows that support fast exploration, useful iteration, and appropriate production safeguards.
• Earn adoption. Work alongside product teams, listen closely, teach through examples, and turn recurring questions and exceptions into improvements to the system.
• Keep the team moving forward. Experiment as models and tools evolve, share what you learn, and change direction when the evidence calls for it.

WHAT YOU NEED

• Experience leading and developing strong design or design engineering teams, with a track record of setting direction and delivering meaningful outcomes.
• Exceptional visual and interaction design skills. Your work shows a clear point of view, attention to detail, and an ability to make complex experiences feel simple.
• Deep systems thinking and experience building systems that other teams actually adopt. You can show how your work improved both their speed and the quality of what shipped.
• Strong technical fluency. You can prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture, and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers—not just hand off specifications.
• Active, hands‑on use of AI in your design and building workflow. You understand where it helps, where it fails, and how to improve its output rather than accept it.
• Experience turning design principles into practical guidance, reusable patterns, and quality checks that work at scale.
• Strong product judgment and a habit of staying close to the people using what you build. You connect system decisions to real workflows and customer outcomes.
• The ability to create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and maintain momentum without losing the quality bar.
• Curiosity that borders on obsession about how AI changes software and how we build it—and the ability to ignite that curiosity in others.

NICE TO HAVES

• Experience building agent-usable design guidance, generation workflows, or evaluations for design quality.
• Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams’ daily workflow.
• Experience leading a major design-system migration or company-wide change in how teams build.
• Experience evolving a system across platforms or connecting product and brand experiences.
• Founder or early-stage startup experience.

BENEFITS AVAILABLE TO ALL FULL-TIME RAMP EMPLOYEES (GLOBAL)

• Flexible PTO
• Centralized home-office equipment ordering
• Health and wellness stipend
• Budget for intra-office travel
• Weekly coffee stipend

UNITED STATES

• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents
• One Medical annual membership
• 401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp
• Fertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay
• Pet insurance
• In-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more
• Relocation expense coverage to NYC or SF (if needed)

CANADA

• Group medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sun Life
• Life, AD&D, and disability coverage
• Fertility drug coverage (up to $4,000 lifetime)
• Group Retirement Plan with employer match (RRSP + DPSP)
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay, with additional time available at reduced pay
• Employee Assistance Program and virtual care through Lumino Health

UNITED KINGDOM

• Private medical insurance through Freedom Elite
• Virtual GP and at-home care via eMed x Livi
• Workplace pension through Penfold, with salary sacrifice option
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay with additional time available at reduced pay

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Ramp Applicant Privacy Notice https://ramp.com/legal/applicant-privacy-notice