Principal 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.

About the role

We're looking for Ethos' first Principal Design Systems Designer to build the foundations that let designers, PMs, and engineers reliably produce on-brand, accessible, high-quality UI, — and to stand up the prompt-to-production pipeline that turns those outputs into shipped products.

This is a true 0→1 opportunity. Ethos is not yet "design-system mature," and we're deliberately building it in an AI-native way rather than retrofitting later.

You'll partner closely with Product Design, Engineering, Brand/Creative, Content Design, and our AI tooling efforts to build a system where Figma, Cursor / Claude Code, and Storybook form one coherent pipeline — with the right human checkpoints in the loop.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Audit the current product UI and existing design artifacts; identify the highest-leverage opportunities to standardize, consolidate, and reduce inconsistency.
• Define the information architecture of the system itself — naming, taxonomy, component hierarchy, and documentation structure — so that both humans and AI agents can find, reason about, and correctly apply the right primitives.
• Create a concrete step-by-step plan by partnering with design, engineering, and leadership, to correctly prioritize pieces of this effort, balancing long-term scalability with near-term product needs.
• Define and ship a scalable token strategy (color, typography, spacing, elevation, motion) with a pipeline that keeps Figma variables, code tokens, and Storybook in sync.
• Partner with Front-End engineers to translate the system into reusable, well-architected components with clear APIs, states, and accessibility built in.
• Own the component lifecycle end-to-end: versioning, release notes, deprecations, and handoffs.
• Build a lightweight, builder-friendly contribution process — designers, engineers, and PMs should be able to propose, review, and add to the system without a heavy governance tax.
• Create documentation that people (and agents) actually use: guidelines, do/don't examples, usage rationale, and decision records, structured so they're machine-readable as well as human-readable.
• Drive pragmatic adoption: start where it matters most, ship iteratively, and build credibility through visible product impact.
• Define how AI agents help audit, tag, and maintain the system's structure — and where human review gates belong (naming decisions, deprecations, new pattern introductions).
• Shape the pipeline that takes a Figma frame or a PM's prompt through Cursor / Claude Code into Storybook-validated components, including the review checkpoints that keep quality, accessibility, and brand integrity intact.
• Make the system legible to agents. Ensure components, tokens, and patterns are documented, named, and structured so that when a designer or PM prompts an agent to "build the post-intent screen," the agent reaches for the right primitives and produces something shippable — not something that needs to be rebuilt.
• Define what success looks like and track meaningful signals: adoption, UI consistency, design/dev cycle time, accessibility improvements, and