Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

- 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

- Represent Design Systems and AI Patterns work in cross-functional forums, translating system-level tradeoffs for engineering and product leadership

- 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

- 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. This role requires high craft, not just governance

- 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

- Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for current or future employer sponsorship.

- Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work - demonstrating curiosity, a willingness to learn, and sound judgment in applying AI responsibly to improve efficiency and impact