Senior Design Manager, 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 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.

• 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.

• 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…