Staff Product Designer, Design Systems

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it. Vanta's Design Systems team is the foundational layer that powers visual consistency, design quality, and engineering velocity across all of Vanta's product surfaces. We build and maintain Vanta's shared component library (Alpaca), design tokens, interaction patterns, and documentation, enabling product designers and engineers to ship high-quality, cohesive experiences at scale. As Vanta grows across GRC, Trust, and new product areas, and as AI and agentic experiences become a first-class part of the product, Design Systems is increasingly responsible for a harder problem than static component consistency: building a system that can flex for AI-driven, runtime-composed UI and agent chat and canvas experiences, without losing the craft and coherence that makes Alpaca trustworthy across the org. This role sits at that intersection. You'll help define how a design system stays foundational when the product itself is becoming more dynamic and model-aware. What you’ll do as a Staff Product Designer at Vanta: - 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 How to be successful in this role: - 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 syst