Principal Design Engineer, Storytelling

About Ancestry

When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, connects everyone with their past so they can discover, preserve, and share their unique family stories. With our unparalleled collection of more than 65 billion records, over 3.5 million subscribers, and over 27 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives.

Over the past 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving, and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

We are committed to our location flexible work approach, allowing you to choose to work in the nearest office, from your home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office- see the full list of eligible US locations HERE). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations, to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.

Together, we work every day to foster a work environment that's inclusive as well as diverse, and where our people can be themselves. Every idea and perspective is valued so that our products and services reflect the global and diverse clients we serve.

Ancestry encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants.

Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? We’re looking for a Principal Design-Engineer to join our Storytelling team — a specialized group that works across all our product areas to ensure our experiences feel cohesive, high-quality, and deeply valuable to customers. This is a hybrid role at the intersection of product design, front‑end engineering, and prototyping. You’ll help bridge the gap between what the design team creates and what engineering ships — turning design intent into working, testable reality across web and native platforms.

This role is focused on making ideas real faster and more accurately.

You’ll report directly to the Head of Design and collaborate closely across product, design, engineering, research, content, and data science. You will play a key role in extending our design system into implementation‑ready and agent‑ready structures — helping both engineers and designers by helping shape emerging AI workflows.

• Translate design explorations into clear hypotheses that can be tested, validated, and built.
• Build interactive, code‑based prototypes that bridge the gap between design intent and engineering implementation across web and native platforms.
• Partner closely with designers to refine interaction models into buildable directions for iOS, Android, and web experiences.
• Work with engineers across platform teams to ensure shipped experiences faithfully reflect intended design quality and behavior.
• Create lightweight, production‑adjacent implementations that reduce ambiguity across multi‑platform product areas.
• Contribute to and evolve design systems so they function seamlessly across design tools, code, and production environments.
• Develop steering documents and implementation frameworks that make design intent explicit, consistent, and buildable.
• Enable designers to work more directly in live code by creating shared foundations, tools, and reusable patterns across platforms.

• Experienced product designer with strong front‑end engineering or design‑engineering experience.
• Comfortable operating at a principal IC level, shaping direction while also building hands‑on prototypes and code.
• Strong ability to translate design intent into working software across web, iOS, and Android environments.
• Fluent in CSS.
• Familiar with modern front‑end technologies (e.g., React, Next.js, Tailwind…) and familiar with native app constraints and patterns.
• Deep understanding of how design decisions translate into engineering implementation across multiple platforms.
• Proven ability to work across complex, multi‑surface products…