Principal Design Systems Designer

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

About Ethos

Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.

About the role

We're looking for Ethos' first Principal Design Systems Designer to build the foundations that let designers, PMs, and engineers reliably produce on-brand, accessible, high-quality UI, — and to stand up the prompt-to-production pipeline that turns those outputs into shipped products.

This is a true 0→1 opportunity. Ethos is not yet "design-system mature," and we're deliberately building it in an AI-native way rather than retrofitting later.

You will partner closely with Product Design, Engineering, Brand/Creative, Content Design, and our AI tooling efforts to build a system where Figma, Cursor / Claude Code, and Storybook form one coherent pipeline — with the right human checkpoints in the loop.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Audit the current product UI and existing design artifacts; identify the highest-leverage opportunities to standardize, consolidate, and reduce inconsistency.
• Define the information architecture of the system itself — naming, taxonomy, component hierarchy, and documentation structure — so that both humans and AI agents can find, reason about, and correctly apply the right primitives.
• Create a concrete step-by-step plan by partnering with design, engineering, and leadership, to correctly prioritize pieces of this effort, balancing long-term scalability with near-term product needs.
• Define and ship a scalable token strategy (color, typography, spacing, elevation, motion) with a pipeline that keeps Figma variables, code tokens, and Storybook in sync.
• Partner with Front-End engineers to translate the system into reusable, well-architected components with clear APIs, states, and accessibility built in.
• Own the component lifecycle end-to-end: versioning, release notes, deprecations, and handoffs.
• Build a lightweight, builder-friendly contribution process — designers, engineers, and PMs should be able to propose, review, and add to the system without a heavy governance tax.
• Create documentation that people (and agents) actually use: guidelines, do/don't examples, usage rationale, and decision records, structured so they're machine-readable as well as human-readable.
• Drive pragmatic adoption: start where it matters most, ship iteratively, and build credibility through visible product impact.
• Define how AI agents help audit, tag, and maintain the system's structure — and where human review gates belong (naming decisions, deprecations, new pattern introductions).
• Shape the pipeline that takes a Figma frame or a PM's prompt through Cursor / Claude Code into Storybook-validated components, including the review checkpoints that keep quality, accessibility, and brand integrity intact.
• Make the system legible to agents. Ensure components, tokens, and patterns are documented, named, and structured so that when a designer or PM prompts an agent to "build the post-intent screen," the agent reaches for the right primitives and produces something shippable — not something that needs to be rebuilt.
• Define what success looks like and track meaningful signals: adoption, UI consistency, design/dev cycle time, accessibility improvements, and the quality of AI-generated output against the system.
• Partner with Research and Data where useful to connect system changes to product outcomes (quality, user confidence, conversion efficiency).

Qualifications and Skills:

• Has owned a design system end-to-end at a product company, including the organizational work of getting it adopted — not just the design artifact.
• Deep fluency with design-to-code integration: tokens pipelines, component APIs, versioning, and keeping design and code in sync in practice (not just in theory).
• Track record of driving adoption through pragmatic, builder-friendly processes rather than heavyweight governance.
• Strong working knowledge of modern front-end concepts (tokens, components, states, responsive behavior) and comfort collaborating closely with engineers on tradeoffs.
• Experience setting accessibility standards and shipping accessible components (WCAG-informed practices, inclusive design thinking).
• Genuine curiosity and hands-on experience with AI-assisted design and development workflows — you've used tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent, and have a point of view on where humans need to stay in the loop.
• Sets direction for peers and partner teams. Comfortable making opinionated calls on ambiguous tradeoffs (governance vs. speed, system purity vs. product reality, human review vs. agent autonomy) and defending them with evidence.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and build structure where it doesn't yet exist — pragmatic, opinionated, iterative.
• Clear communicator who can align diverse stakeholders and influence without formal authority.

The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $165,000 - $292,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits.

You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the SF Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records.

To learn more about what information we collect and how it may be used, please refer to the California Candidate Privacy Notice.

Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com. We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.