Design Systems Lead

ABOUT THE ROLE

How we build software is changing. Designers are building tools and agents, prototyping in code, and shipping directly into the product. More people can create software than ever before. That makes design judgment more important, not less.

We’re looking for a Design Systems Lead to build that judgment into the foundations of Ramp.

This is not just about maintaining a component library. It’s about making it possible for designers, engineers, and agents to build experiences that look, feel, and work like Ramp—without a designer driving every decision or the design systems team reviewing every change.

You’re a designer first, with the technical depth to guide architecture and get into the code. You have exceptional taste and strong opinions about typography, hierarchy, interaction, and motion. Just as importantly, you know how to turn that judgment into patterns, tools, and guidance that make everyone else’s work better.

You’re deeply curious about AI and already using it to change how you work. You build, experiment, inspect the results, and push past the demo. You can imagine a different way of building software—and lead a team toward it.

This role is for you if you’re excited by:

- Making great design reproducible. Raise the quality of Ramp’s product and encode what makes it good, so people and agents can produce coherent, usable experiences by default. The system should make excellent work easier, not make every experience look the same.

- Reimagining what a design system can be. Build beyond components and tokens into composition, interaction patterns, agent guidance, and evaluations. Connect exploration and production so the fastest way to build is also a path to great quality.

- Leading a team that multiplies everyone else’s impact. Create clear direction, ambitious goals, and a caring yet demanding environment. Inspire curiosity, develop people, and stay close enough to the work to help make it exceptional.

The opportunity is to raise the floor for everyone building at Ramp, while giving designers more room to make the most important experiences extraordinary.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Lead and develop the design systems team. Set clear priorities, ownership, and goals. Give direct, timely feedback, hold people accountable, and help them do the best work of their careers.

- Own the system’s vision and direction. Decide what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on what builders and customers need. Turn that direction into focused work the team can deliver.

- Elevate Ramp’s visual and interaction design. Raise the bar for typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility, and the states beyond the happy path.

- Make design judgment usable by people and agents. Translate principles into reusable patterns, reference experiences, composition rules, and guidance that produce better work without you in the room.

- Guide technical architecture with engineering. Shape everything from components and tokens to how agents discover guidance, compose interfaces, and check their work. Make sound tradeoffs between flexibility, coherence, performance, and ease of use.

- Stay hands-on. Build prototypes, work in code, and get into implementation details to test ideas, unblock the team, and understand where the system breaks down.

- Define and measure quality. Build repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks. Measure whether builders can ship better work faster, with less rework—not just whether they use the tools.

- Improve the path from idea to shipped experience. Partner with engineering and AI teams on workflows that support fast exploration, useful iteration, and appropriate production safeguards.

- Earn adoption. Work alongside product teams, listen closely, teach through examples, and turn recurring questions and exceptions into improvements to the system.

- Keep the team moving forward. Experiment as models and tools evolve, share what you learn, and change direction when the evidence calls for it.

WHAT YOU NEED

- Experience leading and developing strong design or design engineering teams, with a track record of setting direction and delivering meaningful outcomes.

- Exceptional visual and interaction design skills. Your work shows a clear point of view, attention to detail, and an ability to make complex experiences feel simple.

- Deep systems thinking and experience building systems that other teams actually adopt. You can show how your work improved both their speed and the quality of what shipped.

- Strong technical fluency. You can prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture, and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers—not just hand off specifications.

- Active, hands-on use of AI in your design and building workflow. You understand where it helps, where it fails, and how to improve its output rather than accept it.

- Experience turning design principles into practical guidance, reusable patterns, and quality checks that work at scale.

- Strong product judgment and a habit of staying close to the people using what you build. You connect system decisions to real workflows and customer outcomes.

- The ability to create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and maintain momentum without losing the quality bar.

- Curiosity that borders on obsession about how AI changes software and how we build it—and the ability to ignite that curiosity in others.

NICE TO HAVES

- Experience building agent-usable design guidance, generation workflows, or evaluations for design quality.

- Experience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams’ daily workflow.

- Experience leading a major design-system migration or company-wide change in how teams build.

- Experience evolving a system across platforms or connecting product and brand experiences.

- Founder or early-stage startup experience.