Director of Product Design

Job description

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. The Third-Party Risk Management team drives product development excellence across Vanta's EPD organization. This area is responsible for building and improving the tools, practices, and systems that enable product squads to move faster and deliver higher-quality experiences. As Director of Design, you will lead a team of product designers, set the design strategy for the area, and ensure Vanta ships world-class user experiences across your squads. As a Director of Product Design at Vanta, you will define a net-new experience vision, strategy, and execution for a highly AI-centric workflow builder. You’ll partner cross functionally to align others around your vision and execution, championing your experience strategy to scale your customer impact. You’ll enable Vanta to serve our most complex enterprise use cases while opening up an entirely new class of automation and extensibility across the product. **What you’ll do as a Director of Design at Vanta:** - Set the vision and design strategy for Vanta’s Risk product area, helping customers understand, prioritize, and act on risk across their organizations. - Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of product designers while fostering a culture of craft, experimentation, accountability, and customer obsession. - Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Content Design, Design Systems, and Go-to-Market teams to shape strategy and deliver cohesive customer experiences. - Translate complex risk management workflows into intuitive, scalable experiences for security, compliance, IT, legal, finance, and business stakeholders. - Define experiences that help customers identify, assess, treat, monitor, communicate, and report on risk. - Create simple, connected workflows across risks, assets, vendors, controls, tasks, frameworks, owners, approvals, and organizational hierarchies. - Guide the design of enterprise-grade risk registers, dashboards, reporting experiences, and workflows that give customers a clear view of their risk posture. - Lead customer-centered discovery and research with risk managers, security leaders, compliance professionals, and other Vanta customers to identify meaningful problems and validate solutions. - Establish a high bar for interaction design, visual design, information architecture, accessibility, content, and overall product quality. - Influence product strategy and roadmap decisions through strong design perspectives, customer insights, prototypes, and compelling narratives. - Develop frameworks and processes that help the Risk design team make effective decisions, move quickly, and maintain consistency across complex product experiences. - Partner with the Design Systems team to evolve reusable patterns that support a coherent and scalable Vanta experience. - Bring clarity to ambiguous, highly complex problems and help cross-functional teams align around a shared vision of the customer experience. - Define and measure the impact of design through customer outcomes, product adoption, usability, efficiency, and business results. - Help shape AI-powered experiences that make risk management more proactive, actionable, and accessible while applying sound judgment around trust, transparency, and responsible use of AI. - Represent Design in leadership discussions, planning processes, product reviews, and other cross-functional forums. - Contribute to the broader Design organization by sharing best practices, mentoring leaders and designers, and strengthening how Vanta approaches product design. - Working AI-natively: uses AI tools throughout the design process, and has shipped designs for non-deterministic, AI-powered experiences (chat, agentic modalities, etc). **How to be successful in this role:** - 10+ years of experience designing digital products, including significant experience leading product design for complex B2B SaaS or enterprise software. - 4+ years of experience managing and developing product designers, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. - Experience setting design direction for a product area and translating company strategy into clear team priorities and outcomes. - A track record of designing intuitive workflows for complex, data-rich, or highly configurable products. - Strong product thinking and systems thinking, with the ability to understand relationships across interconnected objects, users, workflows, and business processes. - Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering leaders to shape strategy, prioritize investments, and deliver high-quality products. - A deep understanding of customer-centered design practices, including qualitative research, journey mapping, prototyping, usability testing, and iterative product development. - Strong interaction design, information architecture, visual design, and storytelling skills, with a portfolio demonstrating thoughtful and high-quality work. - Experience designing products in risk management, cybersecurity, compliance, GRC, IT, infrastructure, financial services, or another complex and regulated domain is a plus. - Familiarity with design systems and experience creating scalable patterns that support consistency across a growing product. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence executives, cross-functional partners, and customers. - Comfortable operating in ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and balancing strategic thinking with a bias for action. - A collaborative leadership style and a demonstrated ability to build trust, encourage diverse perspectives, and bring teams together around a shared vision. - A strong commitment to Vanta’s principles: putting customers first, biasing for action, winning as one team, deciding with frameworks, leading with resilience, and doing what it says on the tin. - Required: Bachelor’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Computer Science, or a related field. - Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for current or future employer sponsorship. - Responsible for protecting Vanta and customer data in how your team operates and delivers results. - Open to using AI to amplify your skills and strengthen your work, demonstrating curiosity, a willingness to learn, and sound judgment in applying AI responsibly to improve efficiency and impact. **What you can expect as a Vanta’n:** - Industry-competitive salary and equity - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with 100% of employee-only benefit premiums covered for most medical plans - 16 weeks paid Parental Leave for all new parents - Health & wellness stipend - Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipend - Commuter benefits for team members who report to the SF and NYC office - Family planning benefits - Matching 401(k) contribution with immediate vesting - Flexible PTO policy, plus 80 hours of Sick Time - 11 company-paid holidays - Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company-wide events! - Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, 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. #LI-remote *At Vanta, we are committed to hiring diverse talent of different backgrounds and as such, it is important to us to provide an inclusive work environment for all. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender identity, age, religion, sexual orientation, veteran or disability status, or any other protected class. As an equal opportunity employer, we encourage and welcome people of all backgrounds to apply.* **About Vanta** We started in 2018, in the wake of several high-profile data breaches. Online security was only becoming more important, but we knew firsthand how hard it could be for fast-growing companies to invest the time and manpower it takes to build a solid security foundation. Vanta was inspired by a vision to restore trust in internet businesses by enabling companies to improve and prove their security. From our early days automating security monitoring for compliance standards like SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 27001 to creating the world's leading Trust Management Platform, our vision remains unchanged. Now more than ever, making security continuous—not just a point-in-time check— is essential. Thousands of companies rely on Vanta to build, maintain and demonstrate their trust— all in a way that's real-time and transparent. **Referral Instructions** If you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.