Design Systems Designer

Overview

About Ethos Ethos was built to make it faster and easier to get life insurance for the next million families. Our approach blends industry expertise, technology, and the human touch to find you the right policy to protect your loved ones.

We leverage deep technology and data science to streamline the life insurance process, making it more accessible and convenient. Using predictive analytics, we are able to transform a traditionally multi-week process into a modern digital experience for our users that can take just minutes! We’ve issued billions in coverage each month and eliminated the traditional barriers, ushering the industry into the modern age.

Our full-stack technology platform is the backbone of family financial health.

We make getting life insurance easier, faster and better for everyone.

Our investors include General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, Soft Bank, and the investment vehicles of Jay-Z, Kevin Durant, Robert Downey Jr and others. This year, we were named on CB Insights  Global Insurtech 50 list and Built In s Top 100 Midsize Companies in San Francisco. We are scaling quickly and looking for passionate people to protect the next million families!

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.

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…