Staff Design Systems Designer

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.

Design at Ethos

Design at Ethos plays a meaningful role in shaping our product and customer experience end-to-end. We work cross-functionally to solve hard problems, build products that matter, and raise the bar for craft in a highly regulated, decision-heavy domain. You’ll experiment, learn quickly, and help us build a stronger design practice as we grow.

About the Role

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.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Strategy & Foundations

• 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.

System Design & Craft

• 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).

Engineering Partnership

• 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.

Governance, Adoption & Enablement

• 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.

Measurement & Iteration

• 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).

Qualifications and Skills:

• 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).
• 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. 

#LI-Remote #LI-JA1

The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $126,000 - $224,000. 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/

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace.

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 our 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.