Staff Product Designer, Design Systems
Overview
Vanta is a company dedicated to helping businesses earn and prove trust in their online security. The Design Systems team is crucial in powering visual consistency, design quality, and engineering velocity across all of Vanta's products. This role involves defining how a design system evolves as the product becomes more dynamic and model-aware.
What You’ll Do
Lead the strategy, evolution, and execution of Alpaca, ensuring it scales with the needs of a rapidly growing, increasingly AI-driven product organization.
Extend the design system to support AI and agent product patterns, including agent chat and canvas experiences and components that need to adapt based on runtime or model context.
Partner with product designers and engineers across every product team to define, document, and ship new components, patterns, and guidelines.
Establish and evolve governance models, contribution frameworks, and quality standards that let every designer at Vanta build consistently, including for AI-native surfaces that don't fit traditional static component thinking.
Drive design system adoption through education, tooling, and proactive partnership, especially with teams building agentic features who may be new to systems thinking.
Mentor other designers, including senior designers, on systems thinking, component architecture, and how to design well within (and push against) a shared system.
Advocate for accessibility and inclusive design as a foundational requirement across all components, patterns, and documentation.
Requirements
7+ years of experience as a product designer, with significant depth in design systems, ideally within complex B2B SaaS.
Deep expertise building and evolving scalable design systems, including component architecture, design tokens, and pattern libraries, plus a strong point of view on how those foundations need to change for AI and agentic product surfaces.
Strong visual design foundation, with mastery of typography, color theory, spacing, interaction design, and accessibility principles.
Comfort operating in ambiguity where org boundaries (e.g., between Design Systems and AI/Agent product work) aren't fully settled, and the judgment to help shape that structure rather than wait for it.
Experience collaborating closely with front-end engineers, with enough fluency in front-end code to reason credibly about design-to-code fidelity and, ideally, contribute directly.
Expert-level proficiency in Figma, including variants, auto-layout, and design tokens, with experience publishing and managing shared libraries at scale.
Strong soft skills: the ability to influence without direct authority, build alignment across designers, engineers, and leadership who may have competing priorities, and communicate system-level tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
A track record of mentoring other designers and raising the craft and systems literacy of the people around you.
Qualifications
Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for current or future employer sponsorship.
Benefits
Industry-competitive salary and equity.
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with 100% of employee-only benefit premiums covered for most medical plans.
16 weeks paid Parental Leave for all new parents.
Health & wellness stipend.
Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipend.
Commuter benefits for team members who report to the SF and NYC office.
Family planning benefits.
Matching 401(k) contribution with immediate vesting.
Flexible PTO policy, plus 80 hours of Sick Time.
11 company-paid holidays.
Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company-wide events!
Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and Sydney.