Responsibilities
- Set the north star in partnership with engineering. Define and co-own Alpaca’s multi-quarter strategy and roadmap, aligning foundations, components, and tooling with business goals and upmarket maturity.
- Partner with Engineering Manager Kacey Lewis to shape scope, governance, and quality standards that ensure scalable, accessible, and cohesive experiences.
- Lead and grow the team. Manage and mentor three design systems designers (and 1 hire ahead), establishing rituals, critique, standards, and a culture of craft, pace, and psychological safety.
- Ensure coherence and enable quality. Evolve conventions, tooling, and guidance that prevent UI/UX drift and make it easy for teams to design and build consistently.
- Build a culture of design and frontend excellence. Partner with engineering to strengthen shared ownership of quality across the EPD org. Champion system thinking, frontend craftsmanship, and consistent use of Alpaca to elevate quality and accelerate delivery.
- Raise accessibility and internationalization standards. Embed accessibility and internationalization requirements into definitions of ready and done, supported by reusable guidance, and ensure testing and automation coverage.
- Support a visual refresh. Partner with brand and product design to evolve the visual language of the Alpaca Design System and Vanta’s product experience. Plan and guide the rollout of foundational and component updates, ensuring a smooth and coordinated product-wide migration.
- Communicate up and across. Share updates and tradeoffs clearly with leadership. Build trust and shared ownership with product, engineering, brand, and go-to-market stakeholders.
- Measure and iterate. Define system health metrics (adoption, detach rate, design review issues, build time saved, migration progress) and use them to prioritize and celebrate progress.
Requirements
- 10+ years in product design with at least 3 years leading design systems teams in a fast-growing B2B SaaS environment.
- Experience supporting enterprise-scale use cases.
- Proven ability to set and uphold healthy system rules and boundaries that maintain quality and consistency, while offering clear and practical approaches to leveraging and extending the system to keep teams moving forward.
- Experience leading or supporting large-scale visual refreshes or component library migrations.
- Experience delivering versioned systems with governance, contribution models, deprecations, and company-wide migrations.
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills. Experienced in co-planning with engineering and product, influencing through clarity and rationale, and earning trust across disciplines.
- Excellent communication skills. Able to simplify complex tradeoffs and clearly articulate rationale to executives, engineers, and designers alike.
Nice to Have
- Experience with design tokens, theming, and React component libraries like Radix, with a strong grasp of accessibility and performance tradeoffs.
Benefits
- Industry-competitive compensation
- 100% covered medical, dental, and vision benefits with dependents coverage
- 16 weeks fully-paid parental Leave for all new parents
- Health & wellness and remote workplace stipends
- Family planning benefits through Carrot Fertility
- 401(k) matching
- Flexible work hours and location
- Open PTO policy
- 11 paid holidays in the US
- Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, and Sydney
Additional Information
- To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors and may vary based on candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.
