Lead Product Designer, Systems

About Ancestry:

When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, connects everyone with their past so they can discover, preserve, and share their unique family stories. With our unparalleled collection of more than 65 billion records, over 3.5 million subscribers, and over 27 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Over the past 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving, and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

We are committed to our location flexible work approach, allowing you to choose to work in the nearest office, from your home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office- see the full list of eligible US locations HERE). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations, to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.

Together, we work every day to foster a work environment that's inclusive as well as diverse, and where our people can be themselves. Every idea and perspective is valued so that our products and services reflect the global and diverse clients we serve. 

Ancestry encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? Join the curious.

We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to join our Vision team — a small, highly flexible group that partners across the organization to shape the future of our product experience. This team helps define the foundational design systems, patterns, and experience principles that enable cohesive, high-quality experiences across Ancestry.

This role is focused on systems design at scale. You’ll work across product areas to identify fragmentation, clarify interaction patterns, and design the building blocks that teams use to create consistent, intuitive experiences. Rather than owning any single area, you’ll help ensure that every experience feels like part of a connected whole.

You’ll report directly to the Head of Design and collaborate closely with peers across product, design, engineering, research, content, and science. Together, you’ll help ensure that teams move faster with greater clarity while maintaining a high bar for craft and coherence.

What you’ll do

• 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.

• Embed within product teams to shape early thinking, unblock design challenges, and elevate execution quality.

• Partner closely with research and customer insights teams, including direct conversations with customers, 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.

Who you are

• 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.

Bonus: Experience with consumer subscription products, social experiences, storytelling products, creator tools, or products centered around memories, identity, and connection.

Why Ancestry?

Join a dedicated team working to connect millions of people with their past and enrich their futures. At Ancestry, you will play a role in pioneering legal solutions that shape the consumer genomics industry. Your contributions will help foster and protect our workforce that is dedicated to helping our customers tell their own stories, while supporting a brand recognized and trusted around the world. We offer a collaborative workplace, competitive compensation, and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

Compensation

Ancestry values pay transparency and equity. As a signatory of the ParityPledge in Support of Women and the ParityPledge in Support of People of Color, we are pleased to share the base salary range for this position: $130,000 - $150,000 with eligibility for bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision. Actual salary will depend on location and experience. We will provide detailed compensation data for a specific location during the recruiting process.

*Note: Disclosure as required by sb19-085(8-5-20) and sb1162(1-1-23).

Additional Information:

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law. For candidates who live in San Francisco, CA, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.