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Ramp is building smart infrastructure for finance teams, automating how over $200B in annualized spend flows through 70,000+ companies. The company handles payment authorization, risk flagging, spend categorization, and financial close processes.
You will lead Ramp's design systems team, responsible for building the foundations that enable designers, engineers, and AI agents to create coherent, high-quality experiences at scale. This is not a traditional component-library role—it's about encoding design judgment into patterns, tools, and guidance that make excellent work reproducible and accessible to everyone building at Ramp.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and develop the design systems team, setting priorities, ownership, and goals while providing direct feedback and accountability.
- Own the system's vision and direction, deciding what to preserve, evolve, simplify, or replace based on builder and customer needs.
- Elevate Ramp's visual and interaction design across typography, hierarchy, density, motion, responsive behavior, and accessibility.
- Translate design principles into reusable patterns, reference experiences, composition rules, and guidance that produce better work without requiring your involvement in every decision.
- Guide technical architecture with engineering, shaping components, tokens, agent discovery mechanisms, and quality checks.
- Stay hands-on by building prototypes, working in code, and diving into implementation details to test ideas and unblock the team.
- Define and measure quality through repeatable evaluations grounded in real tasks, focusing on whether builders ship better work faster with less rework.
- Improve workflows from idea to shipped experience, partnering with engineering and AI teams on exploration, iteration, and production safeguards.
- Drive adoption by working alongside product teams, teaching through examples, and turning recurring questions into system improvements.
- Experiment as models and tools evolve, sharing learnings and adjusting direction based on evidence.
Requirements:
- Proven 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 with a clear point of view, attention to detail, and ability to simplify complex experiences.
- Deep systems thinking and demonstrated experience building systems that other teams actually adopt, with evidence of improved speed and quality.
- Strong technical fluency: ability to prototype and build in code, understand front-end architecture, and work through implementation tradeoffs with engineers.
- Active, hands-on use of AI in your design and building workflow, with understanding of where it helps, where it fails, and how to improve its output.
- Experience translating design principles into practical guidance, reusable patterns, and quality checks that scale.
- Strong product judgment and habit of staying close to users, connecting system decisions to real workflows and customer outcomes.
- Ability to create clarity in ambiguity, make decisions, give difficult feedback, and maintain momentum without compromising quality.
- Curiosity about how AI changes software and how we build it, with ability to inspire that curiosity in others.
Nice to haves: Experience building agent-usable design guidance or evaluations; building designer/developer tools adopted into daily workflows; leading major design-system migrations; evolving systems across platforms; founder or early-stage startup experience.
