Principal Design Systems Architect - AI-Driven 0→1

Peterson Ventures; United States; On-site; USD 165,000 - 292,000; Full time

Job summary

Ethos is seeking its first Principal Design Systems Designer to establish a scalable UI design system and an AI-native pipeline spanning Figma, Cursor/Claude Code, and Storybook.

You will partner with Product Design, Engineering, Brand/Creative, Content Design, and AI tooling efforts to create a coherent, machine-readable system while maintaining human review checkpoints for quality and accessibility.

Qualifications

• Has owned a design system end-to-end at a product company, including adoption work.
• Deep fluency with design-to-code integration: tokens pipelines, component APIs, versioning, and syncing design and code.
• Track record of driving adoption through builder-friendly processes, not heavy governance.
• Strong front-end concepts knowledge (tokens, components, states, responsive behavior) and collaboration with engineers on tradeoffs.
• Experience setting accessibility standards and shipping accessible components.
• Hands-on with AI-assisted design and development workflows (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.).
• Sets direction for peers and partners, defending decisions with evidence.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and build structure where it doesn't yet exist.
• Clear communicator who aligns stakeholders and influences without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Audit the current product UI and design artifacts to standardize and reduce inconsistency.
• Define information architecture: naming, taxonomy, component hierarchy, and documentation structure.
• Create a concrete plan with design, engineering, and leadership to prioritize work for long-term and near-term needs.
• Define and ship a scalable token strategy (color, typography, spacing, elevation, motion) with synced Figma variables, code tokens, and Storybook.
• Partner with front-end engineers to translate the system into reusable components with clear APIs, states, and accessibility.
• Own the component lifecycle end-to-end: versioning, release notes, deprecations, handoffs.
• Build a lightweight, builder-friendly contribution process for designers, engineers, and PMs.
• Create machine-readable and human-readable guidelines, usage rationale, and decision records.
• Drive pragmatic adoption: ship iteratively and show product impact.
• Define how AI agents audit, tag, and maintain the system with human review gates.

Skills

Design system ownership

Design-system tooling

AI-assisted design

Accessibility standards

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

Tools

Figma

Storybook

Cursor

Claude Code

Job description

Ethos is seeking its first Principal Design Systems Designer to establish a scalable UI design system and an AI-native pipeline spanning Figma, Cursor/Claude Code, and Storybook.

You will partner with Product Design, Engineering, Brand/Creative, Content Design, and AI tooling efforts to create a coherent, machine-readable system while maintaining human review checkpoints for quality and accessibility.