Staff Visual Designer - Design Systems

Design Foundations

Design Foundations is a brand-new team at Mercury, responsible for design systems, brand in product, and AI tools to help anyone build. This means this role has real agency to define it: supporting a highly collaborative team that's hungry to grow its craft, and a clean slate for setting the vision forward.

Responsibilities

• Redefine and ship large, foundational improvements to Mercury’s design language (things like type, color, and iconography) that scale beautifully across every product surface.
• Partner with Brand and other craft leaders to bring expressive moments into the product and set direction for how brand and product visual language work together.
• Set the craft bar for the design org: define what excellent looks like, and build the systems, guidelines, and references that make it repeatable.
• Actively coach product designers on their craft, giving direct feedback that raises the quality bar across both individual work and the design system itself.
• Partner with design systems designers and engineers to make sure visual decisions translate cleanly into scalable, maintainable components.
• Represent design systems and visual craft in conversations with Brand, Engineering, and design leadership.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in visual design, with deep expertise in typography, color systems, and iconography at a product or brand scale.
• A portfolio that shows range: foundational systems work as well as high-craft, expressive visual design.
• Not just taste, but conviction and language to articulate what makes something successful.
• A track record of coaching or mentoring other designers, with a clear point of view on what strong craft looks like and how to teach it.
• Systems thinking, you're comfortable balancing expressive visual design with the pragmatic needs of a scalable design system for a data-rich product.
• Strong stakeholder management, comfortable winning buy-in from executives and cross-functional leaders on high-visibility work, backed by conviction.
• Strong communication and presence: able to set direction, build alignment, and defend opinionated design decisions with both designers and engineers.
• Proficient in design tools and front-end prototyping with React; comfortable working closely with engineers on how visual systems get built and maintained in code. Affinity for AI-assisted prototyping. Motion design skills are a plus.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in visual design, with deep expertise in typography, color systems, and iconography at a product or brand scale.
• A portfolio that shows range: foundational systems work as well as high-craft, expressive visual design.
• Not just taste, but conviction and language to articulate what makes something successful.
• A track record of coaching or mentoring other designers, with a clear point of view on what strong craft looks like and how to teach it.
• Systems thinking, you're comfortable balancing expressive visual design with the pragmatic needs of a scalable design system for a data-rich product.
• Strong stakeholder management, comfortable winning buy-in from executives and cross-functional leaders on high-visibility work, backed by conviction.
• Strong communication and presence: able to set direction, build alignment, and defend opinionated design decisions with both designers and engineers.
• Proficient in design tools and front-end prototyping with React; comfortable working closely with engineers on how visual systems get built and maintained in code. Affinity for AI-assisted prototyping. Motion design skills are a plus.

Skills

• Expertise in typography, color systems, and iconography.
• Experience in defining and shipping large-scale design systems.
• Ability to articulate and defend design decisions effectively.
• Strong stakeholder management and collaboration skills.
• Proficiency in design tools and front-end prototyping with React.
• Experience with AI-assisted prototyping.
• Motion design skills are a plus.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance coverage.
• Flexible vacation and sick leave policies.
• Professional development opportunities.
• Employee resource groups.
• Regular team-building activities.

Pay

• US employees (any location): $228,700 - $285,900 USD
• Canadian employees (any location): $216,200 - $270,200 CAD

Schedule

• Full-time position.