Principal Designer

Avantos.ai

Principal Designer owning the Avantos design system and leading design on the Agent Portal within an AI-native platform transforming financial services.

Posted 7/27/2026full-timeNew York City • New York • 🇺🇸 United StatesLeadWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the Avantos design system end-to-end: component library, design tokens, pattern language, and the contribution rubric that keeps it coherent as the team grows
Set craft direction across the design team through the system, so the bar lives in shared patterns and tenets rather than in one person's head
Lead design on the Agent Portal, our most-trafficked surface and the place where the system ships first and gets pressure-tested in real product work
Author and evolve our design tenets, partnering with the Head of Design to codify what design means at Avantos
Develop the designers around you through critique, mentorship, and modeling rationale-driven thinking
Represent design in cross-functional product and client conversations where senior craft judgment is needed

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years of product design experience, with craft leadership that reaches beyond your own projects; you've moved the bar at a company, not just shipped strong individual work
Deep expertise in product design fundamentals: interaction, information architecture, visual craft, and the systems thinking that turns a component library into a governing design system
A track record of authoring design systems, tenets, or patterns that other designers adopted and built on
Mastery of Figma and the judgment to evolve a design system as a living set of patterns, not a frozen kit
Fluency prototyping in whatever medium fits the question, increasingly in code and with AI rather than only in a design tool
A genuine curiosity, bordering on obsession, about how AI is changing the nature of design, software, and how teams work
Comfort operating as a senior IC and craft anchor without needing a manager title; this role leads through craft and the system, not through reports
Fluency in B2B SaaS or fintech complexity; financial services experience is welcome but not required.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive compensation + meaningful equity.
The opportunity to shape the design foundation of a greenfield AI platform: the system, the craft bar, and how design works here
A rare chance to bring service design thinking to scale, reshaping how advice and servicing are delivered across major financial institutions
A culture built for craft, focus, deep work, and ownership, where design shapes the product rather than decorating someone else's spec