Principal Design Engineer, Storytelling

About Ancestry:

When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, connects everyone with their past so they can discover, preserve, and share their unique family stories. With our unparalleled collection of more than 65 billion records, over 3.5 million subscribers, and over 27 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Over the past 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving, and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

We are committed to our location flexible work approach, allowing you to choose to work in the nearest office, from your home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office- see the full list of eligible US locations HERE). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations, to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.

Together, we work every day to foster a work environment that's inclusive as well as diverse, and where our people can be themselves. Every idea and perspective is valued so that our products and services reflect the global and diverse clients we serve. 

Ancestry encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? Join the curious.

We’re looking for a Principal Design-Engineer to join our Storytelling team — a specialized group that works across all our product areas to ensure our experiences feel cohesive, high-quality, and deeply valuable to customers. This is a hybrid role at the intersection of product design, front-end engineering, and prototyping. You’ll help bridge the gap between what the design team creates and what engineering ships — turning design intent into working, testable reality across web and native platforms.

This role is focused on making ideas real faster and more accurately. You’ll define hypotheses from design explorations, translate them into interactive prototypes or code-based artifacts, and help ensure what gets built matches both the intent and quality of the original design.

You’ll report directly to the Head of Design and collaborate closely across product, design, engineering, research, content, and data science. You will play a key role in extending our design system into implementation-ready and agent-ready structures — helping both engineers and designers by helping shape emerging AI workflows.
 

What you’ll do

• Translate design explorations into clear hypotheses that can be tested, validated, and built.

• Build interactive, code-based prototypes that bridge the gap between design intent and engineering implementation across web and native platforms.

• Partner closely with designers to refine interaction models into buildable directions for iOS, Android, and web experiences.

• Work with engineers across platform teams to ensure shipped experiences faithfully reflect intended design quality and behavior.

• Create lightweight, production-adjacent implementations that reduce ambiguity across multi-platform product areas.

• Contribute to and evolve design systems so they function seamlessly across design tools, code, and production environments.

• Develop steering documents and implementation frameworks that make design intent explicit, consistent, and buildable.

• Enable designers to work more directly in live code by creating shared foundations, tools, and reusable patterns across platforms.

Who you are

• Experienced product designer with strong front-end engineering or design-engineering experience.

• Comfortable operating at a principal IC level, shaping direction while also building hands-on prototypes and code.

• Strong ability to translate design intent into working software across web, iOS, and Android environments.

• Fluent in CSS. Familiar with modern front-end technologies (e.g., React, Next.js, Tailwind…) and familiar with native app constraints and patterns.

• Deep understanding of how design decisions translate into engineering implementation across multiple platforms.

• Proven ability to work across complex, multi-surface products spanning web and native apps.

• Strong collaborator who can align design and engineering around shared interpretation of quality and intent.

• Passionate about craftsmanship in both design execution and production-quality code.

Bonus: Experience with consumer subscription products, digital ecosystems, or value communication within product experiences.

Why Ancestry?

Join a dedicated team working to connect millions of people with their past and enrich their futures. At Ancestry, you will play a role in pioneering legal solutions that shape the consumer genomics industry. Your contributions will help foster and protect our workforce that is dedicated to helping our customers tell their own stories, while supporting a brand recognized and trusted around the world. We offer a collaborative workplace, competitive compensation, and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

Compensation

Ancestry values pay transparency and equity. As a signatory of the ParityPledge in Support of Women and the ParityPledge in Support of People of Color, we are pleased to share the base salary range for this position: $153,000 - $182,000 with eligibility for bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision. Actual salary will depend on location and experience. We will provide detailed compensation data for a specific location during the recruiting process.

*Note: Disclosure as required by sb19-085(8-5-20) and sb1162(1-1-23).

Additional Information:

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law. For candidates who live in San Francisco, CA, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.