Staff Visual Designer - Design Systems

About the role

We're looking for a Staff Visual Designer to raise the ceiling on craft across Mercury’s design system and product experience. This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who can see the whole UI system and knows how to evolve it at scale.

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.

Pay

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

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

Total rewards include base salary, equity (stock options/RSUs), and benefits.