UI/UX Designer, Design Systems
Apply on Clearwater Analytics's site
Clearwater Analytics delivers a unified, front-to-back investment management platform for institutional investors across public and private markets. Our platform, including products like Beacon by Clearwater and Enfusion by Clearwater, supports the full investment lifecycle — front office portfolio and order management, trading, and risk and performance; middle and back office accounting, reporting, and reconciliation; and compliance and investment data management. Clearwater powers more than $10 trillion in assets for 2,400+ clients worldwide, including asset managers, insurers, hedge funds, corporations, banks, pensions, and public sector institutions. A strong, well-governed design system is core to how we scale great design across this large, fast-growing platform.
Role Overview =================
We're looking for a UX/UI Designer, Design Systems to contribute to the strategy, craft, and execution of Clearwater's design system. This is a hands-on role: you'll help shape the direction of the system, design and help build its components and tokens, and drive adoption across product teams. Joining the Design Systems team, you'll be a key contributor to design systems at Clearwater and a close partner to engineering.
This role requires more than systems thinking in Figma. You must be strong in visual/UI craft and comfortable working in code — contributing to or pairing closely with engineers on component libraries, design tokens, and front-end implementation — so that what ships in production matches the system's intent. Proven, hands-on experience building and deploying a design system in a live product is required.
Increasingly, our design system needs to serve builders beyond the design team — engineers, PMs, and AI coding agents generating UI directly from our components and tokens. You'll help treat the design system as enablement infrastructure for anyone building on Clearwater's platform.
Key Responsibilities ========================
- Contribute to the vision, roadmap, and governance for Clearwater's design system across all web products.
- Design and help build core components, patterns, and design tokens — working hands-on in both Figma and code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and component frameworks such as React) so design and implementation stay in lockstep.
- Drive the Figma-to-Storybook component library workflow, ensuring components, variants, and documentation stay synchronized between design and the published library engineers build against.
- Partner with engineering to build and maintain the design system's token pipeline (e.g., Style Dictionary or similar) and shared component library, ensuring tokens map cleanly from design to code.
- Use AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code to accelerate component development, prototyping, and design-to-code handoff.
- Contribute to making the design system machine-consumable — structured component specs, tokens, and documentation that AI coding tools can pull from directly (e.g., an MCP-style integration), so AI-generated UI is on-brand by construction rather than by review.
- Contribute to guardrails and validation (audits, eval criteria, automated checks) that catch off-system or off-brand output from AI-assisted or non-designer contributors at scale, not just from formal design reviews.
- Contribute to defining and evolving design system standards, documentation, and contribution guidelines to support adoption at scale across distributed product teams.
- Drive adoption of the design system across the organization; identify gaps and help prioritize new components or patterns based on real product needs.
- Mentor and support designers and engineers contributing to or consuming the system; help raise the bar on visual and interaction craft.
- Collaborate closely with Product Designers, Visual Designers, Interaction Designers, and Engineers to ensure the system supports dense, data-heavy enterprise workflows (tables, dashboards, reporting, complex forms).
- Help establish and maintain accessibility standards (WCAG) as a built-in property of every component, not an afterthought.
- Contribute to presenting design systems strategy and progress to senior stakeholders, including the VP, Head of UX and engineering leadership.
- Track and report on design system health: adoption rate, component coverage, contribution velocity, and design/engineering consistency.
Required Qualifications ===========================
- 5+ years of experience in product/UX/UI design, including 2+ years working on design systems at scale.
- Proven, hands-on experience designing and deploying a production design system — from Figma library and tokens through shipped code — is required. Design-only or theoretical design systems experience is not sufficient.
- Strong UI development skills: proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with working knowledge of component-based front-end frameworks (e.g., React), and comfort contributing to or pairing closely with engineers on the system's codebase.
- Proficiency with Claude Code or similar AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate component development and design-to-code workflows.
- Experience making a design system consumable by non-designers or AI tooling (structured documentation, APIs/MCPs, or similar), not just human-facing Figma/Storybook libraries.
- Hands-on experience building and maintaining a Figma-to-Storybook (or equivalent) component library pipeline, keeping design and code in sync.
- Advanced Figma skills: variables/tokens, component architecture, auto layout, and prototyping.
- Strong visual design craft — typography, layout, color, spacing, and interaction states — and the ability to apply it to dense, enterprise B2B interfaces.
- Solid understanding of design token tooling and pipelines and how tokens flow from design into production code.
- Strong grasp of accessibility fundamentals (WCAG) and how to encode them into reusable components.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience presenting design work and design systems progress to cross-functional partners and leadership.
- A portfolio that demonstrates both design systems thinking and shipped, production UI — not only visual or marketing work.
Preferred Qualifications ============================
- Experience designing for enterprise SaaS or data-heavy/fintech products (tables, dashboards, complex forms, reporting).
- Experience mentoring or supporting designers and engineers contributing to a shared design system.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted design tools and workflows (e.g., Figma Make, Claude) to accelerate design system work.
- Experience contributing to design system governance models (contribution models, versioning, release processes).
- Motion and micro-interaction design experience.
Key Skills ==============
- Design systems craft and execution
- Strong visual and UI craft
- Front-end/UI development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, component frameworks, Claude Code)
- Figma-to-Storybook component library workflows
- Design token architecture and tooling
- Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder communication
- Mentorship
What Success Looks Like ===========================
- Clearwater has a well-governed, actively adopted design system spanning Figma and code.
- Product teams ship faster and more consistently because the system covers their real needs.
- Design and engineering stay in sync through reliable, well-documented token and component pipelines.
- Design system quality and adoption visibly improve quarter over quarter.
- Non-design contributors (PMs, engineers, AI-assisted workflows) can produce on-system UI without a designer in the loop for every change.
How to Apply ================
Please submit:
- Resume
- Portfolio (required), including 2–3 case studies that highlight your design systems work — covering both design decisions and how the system was implemented and adopted in production.
- A brief note on your experience taking a design system from Figma into shipped, production code.
What We Offer =================
- Business casual atmosphere in a flexible working environment
- Team-focused culture that promotes innovation and ownership
- Access cutting-edge investment reporting technology and expertise
- Defined and undefined career pathways, allowing you to grow your way
- Competitive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance benefits
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Personal Time Off and Volunteer Time Off to give back to the community
- Work from anywhere 3 weeks out of the year
- Work from home Fridays
Why Join Us? ================
This is an incredible opportunity to contribute to a passionate design and engineering team that is shaping the future of investment management technology. If you're ready to take your career to the next level and make a significant impact, apply now! Thank you for your interest in a career with Clearwater!
About Clearwater Analytics
Clearwater Analytics offers a solution that automates the investment lifecycle, offering portfolio planning, performance reporting and more.
More jobs at Clearwater Analytics
- Software Development Engineer
- Software Development Engineer III
- Sr. Product Manager I
- Software Development Engineer III
- Sr. Product Manager I - Regulatory Reporting
- Software Development Engineer II
- Sr. Site Reliability Engineer
- Service Delivery Manager
- UX/UI/Technical Content Intern
- Quantitative Developer I