Lead Product Designer, Systems

About Ancestry

Ancestry® is the global leader in family history, connecting people with their past through a vast collection of records, subscribers, and DNA data. We offer a flexible work environment that allows you to choose the office nearest you, work from home, or a hybrid arrangement (subject to location restrictions and role requirements).

Our culture fosters an inclusive, diverse workplace where all perspectives are valued.

• 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, translating 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 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.

Base salary range: $130,000–$150,000, with eligibility for bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision. Actual salary will depend on location and experience. Detailed compensation data will be provided during the recruiting process.

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law. For candidates who live in San Francisco, CA, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.