Design Systems Lead

Compensation

• Target Base Salary $280K – $385K
• Offers Equity

The final compensation will depend on the location and level at which you are hired.

About Ramp

Ramp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $275B in annualized spend flows in and out of 85,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.

About the Role

We're looking for a Design Systems Lead to build 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.

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.

Benefits

• Flexible PTO
• Centralized home-office equipment ordering
• Health and wellness stipend
• Budget for intra-office travel
• Weekly coffee stipend
• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents
• One Medical annual membership
• 401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp
• Fertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay
• Pet insurance
• In-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more

Required Skills

• Experience leading design or design engineering teams
• Visual and interaction design skills
• Systems thinking
• Technical fluency
• AI in design workflow
• Design principles and guidance
• Product judgment
• Clarity in ambiguity
• Curiosity about AI

Preferred Skills

• Experience building agent-usable design guidance
• Experience building developer or designer tools
• Experience leading a major design-system migration
• Experience evolving a system across platforms
• Founder or early-stage startup experience