Senior Design Manager

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 team is warm, collaborative, talented, and ambitious. We love digging into user needs, sorting out complex problems, and designing solutions that help the whole Vanta product work better together. While some of us have prior security experience, it’s by no means required.

You will thrive at Vanta if you are passionate about building both teams and products, and if you embrace ambiguity, complexity, and the autonomy to shape our experience strategy and how we work as a team. We expect you to play an integral role as a thought leader, shaping our design practice as we continue to scale rapidly.

We are hiring a Senior Design Manager to lead the strategy and day-to-day management of the Alpaca Design System, Vanta’s cross-product system of components, patterns, tooling, and guidance. You will be accountable for raising the bar on quality and consistency across Vanta, enabling product teams to build faster with confidence.

As Vanta scales upmarket, your focus will include accessibility, internationalization, and a visual refresh that uplifts the craft and cohesion of our interface. You will steward a healthy, opinionated system: setting clear standards, coaching designers, and prioritizing work that drives long-term quality and scalability. This includes setting appropriate boundaries to prevent fragmentation and ensuring teams have clear, supported paths forward when exceptions arise.

What you’ll do as a Senior Design Manager at Vanta:

• 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.

How to be successful in this role:

• 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.
• Balances empowerment with consistency. 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.
• Brings systems thinking and strong design taste. Moves fluidly between tokens, components, and page standards, balancing strong aesthetics, accessibility, and performance. Demonstrates hands-on craft leadership, guiding designers toward high-quality, maintainable outcomes.
• Drives large-scale evolution. Experience leading or supporting large-scale visual refreshes or component library migrations.
• Bridges design and engineering with technical fluency. Experienced with design tokens, theming, and React component libraries like Radix, with a strong grasp of accessibility and performance tradeoffs.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills. Experienced in co-planning with engineering and product, influencing through clarity and rationale, and earning trust across disciplines.
• Operational maturity. Experience delivering versioned systems with governance, contribution models, deprecations, and company-wide migrations.
• Data-informed judgment. Comfortable defining and using outcome-oriented metrics to focus the roadmap and communicate progress.
• Excellent communication skills. Able to simplify complex tradeoffs and clearly articulate rationale to executives, engineers, and designers alike.

How we work:

• Source of truth: Alpaca documentation, usage guidance, and migration operations are kept current and actionable.
• Enablement first: Templates, examples, codemods, and checklists reduce friction for product teams.
• Inclusive by default: Accessibility and internationalization are designed in, not added later.
• Measure what matters: Adoption, quality, velocity, and customer impact guide investment.

Portfolio expectations:

Please share a portfolio that highlights:

1. North star system strategy and shipped outcomes.
2. Examples of leadership decisions that directly improved product quality and velocity.
3. Example of a system migration or major upgrade.
4. Pattern documentation and guidance (beyond core components) you or your team delivered.
5. Governance or contribution models you implemented.

What you can expect as a Vantan:

• 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

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.