Principal Design Engineer, Storytelling
Headquarters: Draper, Utah
URL: Ancestry.com
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.
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). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.
The Role
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.
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.
Compensation
Ancestry values pay transparency and equity. The base salary range for this position is $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.
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. All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law.
To apply: Click here to apply via We Work Remotely