Staff, UX Designer - Design System.

Location: San Jose, CA or Boise, ID

About the role

Clearwater Analytics delivers a unified, front-to-back investment management platform for institutional investors across public and private markets. Our platform supports the full investment lifecycle — front office portfolio and order management, trading, risk and performance; middle and back office accounting, reporting, and reconciliation; and compliance and investment data management. Clearwater powers more than $10 trillion in assets for 2,400+ clients worldwide.

We're looking for a Staff UX Designer, Design Systems to own the strategy, craft, and execution of Clearwater's design system. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role: you'll set the vision for the system, design and help build its components and tokens, and drive adoption across product teams. Reporting to the VP, Head of UX, you'll be the primary voice for design systems at Clearwater and a key partner to engineering leadership. This role requires strong visual/UI craft and comfort working in code to ensure what ships in production matches the system's intent.

Increasingly, our design system needs to serve builders beyond the design team — engineers, PMs, and AI coding agents generating UI directly from our components and tokens. You'll treat the design system as enablement infrastructure for anyone building on Clearwater's platform.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision, roadmap, and governance for Clearwater's design system across all web products.
• Design and help build core components, patterns, and design tokens — working hands-on in both Figma and code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and component frameworks such as React) so design and implementation stay in lockstep.
• Own the Figma-to-Storybook component library workflow, ensuring components, variants, and documentation stay synchronized between design and the published library engineers build against.
• Partner with engineering to build and maintain the design system's token pipeline (e.g., Style Dictionary or similar) and shared component library, ensuring tokens map cleanly from design to code.
• Use AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code to accelerate component development, prototyping, and design-to-code handoff.
• Make the design system machine-consumable — structured component specs, tokens, and documentation that AI coding tools can pull from directly, so AI-generated UI is on-brand by construction rather than by review.
• Define guardrails and validation (audits, eval criteria, automated checks) that catch off-system or off-brand output from AI-assisted or non-designer contributors at scale.
• Define and evolve design system standards, documentation, and contribution guidelines to support adoption at scale across distributed product teams.
• Drive adoption of the design system across the organization; identify gaps and prioritize new components or patterns based on real product needs.
• Provide design leadership and mentorship to designers and engineers contributing to or consuming the system; raise the bar on visual and interaction craft.
• Collaborate closely with Product Designers, Visual Designers, Interaction Designers, and Engineers to ensure the system supports dense, data-heavy enterprise workflows (tables, dashboards, reporting, complex forms).
• Establish and maintain accessibility standards (WCAG) as a built-in property of every component, not an afterthought.
• Represent design systems strategy and progress to senior stakeholders, including the VP, Head of UX and engineering leadership.
• Track and report on design system health: adoption rate, component coverage, contribution velocity, and design/engineering consistency.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in product/UX/UI design, including 3+ years leading or building design systems at scale.
• Proven, hands-on experience designing and deploying a production design system — from Figma library and tokens through shipped code — is required. Design-only or theoretical design systems experience is not sufficient.
• Strong UI development skills: proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with working knowledge of component-based front-end frameworks (e.g., React), and comfort contributing to or pairing closely with engineers on the system's codebase.
• Proficiency with Claude Code or similar AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate component development and design-to-code workflows.
• Experience making a design system consumable by non-designers or AI tooling (structured documentation, APIs/MCPs, or similar), not just human-facing Figma/Storybook libraries.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining a Figma-to-Storybook (or equivalent) component library pipeline, keeping design and code in sync.
• Advanced Figma skills: variables/tokens, component architecture, auto layout, and prototyping.
• Strong visual design craft — typography, layout, color, spacing, and interaction states — and the ability to apply it to dense, enterprise B2B interfaces.
• Solid understanding of design token tooling and pipelines and how tokens flow from design into production code.
• Strong grasp of accessibility fundamentals (WCAG) and how to encode them into reusable components.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience presenting design systems strategy and ROI to senior leadership.
• A portfolio that demonstrates both design systems thinking and shipped, production UI — not only visual or marketing work.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for enterprise SaaS or data-heavy/fintech products (tables, dashboards, complex forms, reporting).
• Experience leading or mentoring designers and engineers contributing to a shared design system.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted design tools and workflows (e.g., Figma Make, Claude) to accelerate design system work.
• Experience establishing design system governance models (contribution models, versioning, release processes).
• Motion and micro-interaction design experience.

Skills

• Design systems strategy and execution
• Senior-level visual and UI craft
• Front-end/UI development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, component frameworks, Claude Code)
• Figma-to-Storybook component library workflows
• Design token architecture and tooling
• Cross-functional leadership and stakeholder communication
• Mentorship and design leadership

What Success Looks Like

• Clearwater has a well-governed, actively adopted design system spanning Figma and code.
• Product teams ship faster and more consistently because the system covers their real needs.
• Design and engineering stay in sync through reliable, well-documented token and component pipelines.
• Design system quality and adoption visibly improve quarter over quarter.
• Non-design contributors (PMs, engineers, AI-assisted workflows) can produce on-system UI without a designer in the loop for every change.

Benefits

• Competitive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance benefits
• Maternity and paternity leave
• Personal Time Off and Volunteer Time Off to give back to the community
• RSUs, as well as an employee stock purchase plan and a 401(k) with a match
• Work from anywhere 3 weeks out of the year
• Work from home Fridays

Clearwater offers a business casual atmosphere in a flexible working environment with a team-focused culture that promotes innovation and ownership. Defined and undefined career pathways allow you to grow your way while accessing cutting-edge investment reporting technology and expertise.