Lead Product Designer, Systems

We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to join our Vision team — a small, highly flexible group that partners across the organization to shape the future of our product experience. This team helps define the foundational design systems, patterns, and experience principles that enable cohesive, high-quality experiences across Ancestry.

This role is focused on systems design ’ll work across product areas to identify fragmentation, clarify interaction patterns, and design the building blocks that teams use to create consistent, intuitive experiences. Rather than owning any single area, you’ll help ensure that every experience feels like part of a connected whole.

You’ll report directly to the Head of Design and collaborate closely with peers across product, design, engineering, research, content, and science. Together, you’ll help ensure that teams move faster with greater clarity while maintaining a high bar for craft and coherence.

• Define and evolve core interaction patterns, components, and design principles that ensure consistency across Ancestry’s product ecosystem.
• Identify fragmentation and opportunity areas across teams, and translate them into scalable design systems and shared solutions.
• Embed within product teams to shape early thinking, unblock design challenges, and elevate execution quality.
• Partner closely with research and customer insights teams, including direct conversations with customers, to ground system decisions in real user needs and ensure patterns reflect real‑world behavior.
• Create foundational flows, frameworks, and prototypes that clarify complex cross‑product experiences.
• Partner closely with design, engineering, and content teams to ensure systems are practical, adopted, and maintained.
• Bring structure to ambiguity by connecting individual experiences into a cohesive system of patterns and behaviors.
• Drive alignment across teams on how core experiences should look, feel, and behave.
• Influence product direction through systems thinking, facilitation, and cross‑functional partnership.

• Significant experience in product, systems, or platform design within complex consumer products.
• Strong systems thinker with deep expertise in interaction design, design patterns, and scalable frameworks.
• Skilled at designing across surfaces and identifying reusable patterns that scale across products and experiences.
• Exceptional interaction and visual design craft, with a portfolio demonstrating strong systems thinking and executional quality.
• Comfortable operating as a lead individual contributor—setting direction while remaining deeply hands‑on in the work.
• Experienced in partnering closely with product managers and engineers to build and evolve shared design systems.
• Strong communicator and facilitator, able to align diverse teams around shared principles, patterns, and decisions.
• Highly adaptable and pragmatic—able to balance ideal states with “good enough for now” solutions to maintain speed and momentum.
• Focused on enablement over control: reducing friction, unblocking teams, and helping others move faster.
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and across competing priorities in complex, multi‑team environments.

Bonus:
Experience with consumer subscription products, social experiences, storytelling products, creator tools, or products centered around memories, identity, and connection.

Join a dedicated team working to connect millions of people with their past and enrich their futures. At Ancestry, you will play a role in pioneering legal solutions that shape the consumer genomics industry. Your contributions will help foster and protect our workforce that is dedicated to helping our customers tell their own stories, while supporting a brand recognized and trusted around the world.

We offer a collaborative workplace, competitive compensation, and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

Ancestry values pay transparency and equity. As a signatory of the Parity Pledge in Support of Women and the Parity Pledge in Support of People of Color, we are pleased to share the base salary range for this position: $130,000 - $150,000 with eligibility for…