Staff, UX Designer - Design System.

Location: San Jose, CA or Boise, ID

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 Staff UX Designer, Design Systems to own the strategy, craft, and execution of Clearwater's design system. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role: you'll set the vision for the system, design and help build its components and tokens, and drive adoption across product teams. Reporting to the VP, Head of UX, you'll be the primary voice for design systems at Clearwater and a key partner to engineering leadership. 

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 treat the design system as enablement infrastructure for anyone building on Clearwater's platform. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Own 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. 

• Own 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. 

• Make 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. 

• Define 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. 

• Define and evolve 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 prioritize new components or patterns based on real product needs