{"id":1536756,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ramp-design-systems-lead","title":"Design Systems Lead","company":{"id":4342,"name":"Ramp","domain":"ramp.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ramp","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":47,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.383,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":64,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Design","role_family":"Design","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":280000,"max":385000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":385000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-30T16:00:23Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T06:47:39Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About Ramp\nRamp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $200B in annualized spend flows in and out of 70,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.\nThe problems are high-stakes, data-dense, and unforgiving.\nWe hire people with high agency and high urgency. We look for slope over intercept. We care less about where you trained and more about what you’ve built. At Ramp, everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end and makes consequential decisions that shape the outcome.\nThe median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year - far in excess of businesses operating without Ramp. We believe every ambitious company deserves the same.\nIf you want to build systems that directly shape how companies move and manage billions, Ramp is the place to do it.\nAbout the Role\nHow 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.\nWe’re looking for a Design Systems Lead to build that judgment into the foundations of Ramp.\nThis 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.\nYou’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.\nYou’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.\nThis role is for you if you’re excited by:\nMaking 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.\n\nReimagining 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.\n\nLeading 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.\n\nThe opportunity is to raise the floor for everyone building at Ramp, while giving designers more room to make the most important experiences extraordinary.\nWhat You'll Do\nLead 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.\n\nOwn 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.\n\nElevate Ramp’s visual and interaction design. Raise the bar for typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility, and the states beyond the happy path.\n\nMake 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.\n\nGuide 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.\n\nStay 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.\n\nDefine 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.\n\nImprove 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.\n\nEarn adoption. Work alongside product teams, listen closely, teach through examples, and turn recurring questions and exceptions into improvements to the system.\n\nKeep the team moving forward. Experiment as models and tools evolve, share what you learn, and change direction when the evidence calls for it.\n\nWhat You Need\nExperience leading and developing strong design or design engineering teams, with a track record of setting direction and delivering meaningful outcomes.\n\nExceptional 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.\n\nDeep 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.\n\nStrong 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.\n\nActive, 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.\n\nExperience turning design principles into practical guidance, reusable patterns, and quality checks that work at scale.\n\nStrong 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.\n\nThe ability to create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and maintain momentum without losing the quality bar.\n\nCuriosity that borders on obsession about how AI changes software and how we build it-and the ability to ignite that curiosity in others.\n\nNice to Haves\nExperience building agent-usable design guidance, generation workflows, or evaluations for design quality.\n\nExperience building developer or designer tools that became part of other teams’ daily workflow.\n\nExperience leading a major design-system migration or company-wide change in how teams build.\n\nExperience evolving a system across platforms or connecting product and brand experiences.\n\nFounder or early-stage startup experience.\n\nBenefits available to all full-time Ramp employees (Global)\nFlexible PTO\n\nCentralized home-office equipment ordering\n\nHealth and wellness stipend\n\nBudget for intra-office travel\n\nWeekly coffee stipend\n\nUnited States\n100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents\n\nOne Medical annual membership\n\n401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp\n\nFertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)\n\nParental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay\n\nPet insurance\n\nIn-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more\n\nRelocation expense coverage to NYC or SF (if needed)\n\nCanada\nGroup medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sun Life\n\nLife, AD&D, and disability coverage\n\nFertility drug coverage (up to $4,000 lifetime)\n\nGroup Retirement Plan with employer match (RRSP + DPSP)\n\nParental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay, with additional time available at reduced pay\n\nEmployee Assistance Program and virtual care through Lumino Health\n\nUnited Kingdom\nPrivate medical insurance through Freedom Elite\n\nVirtual GP and at-home care via eMed x Livi\n\nWorkplace pension through Penfold, with salary sacrifice option\n\nParental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay with additional time available at reduced pay\n\nReferral Instructions\nIf you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.\nOther notices\nPursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.\nBeware of recruiting scams: Ramp will only contact you through official @Ramp.com email addresses and will never ask for payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process.\nRamp Applicant Privacy Notice","description_format":"text","description_chars":8698,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Insurance coverage","Parental leave","Retirement plans","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Cards & Card Issuing","Procurement & Spend Management"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-30T19:16:24Z"}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":64,"reasons":["conf:10","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":385000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ramp-design-systems-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ramp-design-systems-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T12:51:36Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4384,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":616,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}