Lead Product Designer, Systems

About the role

The Lead Product Designer will join the Vision team, a small, flexible group that shapes the future of Ancestry’s product experience. This role focuses on systems design at scale, ensuring consistency across Ancestry’s product ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Partner closely with research and customer insights teams 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Visual Arts, Computer Science, or related field.
• Minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in product design or a related field.
• Experience with consumer subscription products, social experiences, storytelling products, creator tools, or products centered around memories, identity, and connection is a plus.

Skills

• Strong systems thinking and ability to design scalable solutions.
• Expertise in interaction design, design patterns, and user experience principles.
• Ability to communicate effectively with cross-functional teams.
• Portfolio showcasing strong systems thinking and executional quality.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Competitive compensation with a base salary range of $130,000 - $150,000 with eligibility for bonus, equity, and other benefits.
• Opportunity to make a meaningful difference in connecting millions of people with their past and enriching their futures.
• Legal solutions shaping the consumer genomics industry.

Pay

$130,000 - $150,000 base salary with eligibility for bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision.

Schedule

Flexible work schedule, allowing employees to choose between working in the nearest office, from home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office).