Principal Designer

About the Role

Imagine owning the design system that defines what excellent looks like across an AI-native platform reshaping financial services, and setting the craft bar for the whole team through it. As Principal Designer, you'll own the Avantos design system end-to-end and lead design on our core product surface, the Agent Portal. This is a senior individual-contributor craft role, not a people-management one. You'll be the craft anchor: the person who decides what good is, builds the system that scales it, and raises the bar for every designer around you.

Design here is moving fast. Our designers prototype in code and build their own AI tooling, and we re-evaluate how we work every few months as new capabilities land. That churn is deliberate, and for the person in this seat it is an invitation: you will help decide how design works at Avantos, not inherit a settled process. What we hold constant is what we value: judgment, taste, and a system that keeps quality high as the team and product scale. When anyone can generate a passable screen in minutes, those are the scarce things, and building them into how the team works is the heart of this role.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Designer you will

• 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

Minimum Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing AI-native or agentic products, where design has to make probabilistic, non-deterministic output feel trustworthy and legible
• A track record of building your own tooling with AI to move faster or raise the bar
• Familiarity with thinkers like Bret Victor, Lou Downe, or Bob Baxley, and a point of view on how craft and systems intersect
• Experience as one of the first senior IC design hires at a Series A or B company

What We Offer

• 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