Product Design Lead

Job description

About Us Socket helps devs and security teams ship faster by cutting out security busywork. Thousands of orgs use Socket to safely find, audit, and manage open source code. Our customers - from Anthropic to xAI, and Figma to Vercel - love Socket (just check out their tweets https://socket.dev/love to see for yourself!) Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross/, a long-time open source maintainer with software downloaded over a billion times a month, Socket has raised $ https://socket.dev/blog/series-b125M in funding https://socket.dev/blog/series-c from top angels, operators, and security leaders. A Letter From our Founder & CEO: The world now runs on open source. Every company, every product, every device you touch depends on code written by strangers on the internet. This is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, but it’s also one of its greatest vulnerabilities. When the software supply chain breaks, the world breaks with it. Our job at Socket is simple to describe and incredibly hard to execute: protect the software that powers everything. That requires world-class engineering, but it also requires world-class design. Security tools are infamous for blinking lights, noisy dashboards, and walls of alerts that no human can keep up with. Developers don't need more noise. They need clarity. They need tools that help them see the truth instantly so they can act with confidence. This is where design becomes a strategic weapon. Great design in security isn't ornamental. It's leverage. It's how we reduce cognitive load, cut through chaos, and make the complex feel intuitive. It's how we give millions of developers a sense of control in an environment that often feels unknowable. It's how we move the entire industry forward. Socket now has five products that all share the same purpose but solve different layers of the supply chain problem: Socket Open Source, Socket Firewall, Socket Certified Patches, Socket Basics, and Extension Guard. Your role is to bring coherence, clarity, and vision to the platform as a whole. You'll work directly with the CEO (Feross), with our engineering team, with our sales and marketing teams, and with our customers who rely on Socket to secure mission-critical systems. Your fingerprints will be on everything we ship. This isn't a supportive design function. It's a core leadership role shaping how developers experience the future of supply chain security. Some of the most design-driven teams in the world use Socket — Vercel, OpenAI, Figma, Replit, and others. These teams care about clarity, craft, and speed, and they expect tools that meet their standards. Your work will be in front of people who notice the details, which pushes all of us to raise the bar. It's one of the most energizing parts of this role. We're looking for someone who sweats the details, thinks in systems, obsesses about clarity, and understands that design is as much about how things work as how they look. Someone who can help us define the primitives, patterns, and interactions that let developers move fast without compromising safety. Someone who wants to build a standard the rest of the industry follows. This is a rare opportunity to design a product that protects the global software ecosystem. The work you do here will directly influence how the world builds and ships code. If you care about craft, if you care about impact, and if you want your design work to matter on a massive scale, then you'll thrive here. [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/a1e99752-fffd-415c-ab55-e28b4ba99921/2a02bb6b-b6ec-40ac-b662-9f1e150ece1e/image.png] [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/a1e99752-fffd-415c-ab55-e28b4ba99921/ab026cef-a37e-47fa-963b-2f0ebea25565/image.png] [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/a1e99752-fffd-415c-ab55-e28b4ba99921/dc559aca-1b70-48a5-92d7-ef89c72ce1d0/image.png] Let's build the future of secure software together. What You'll Do - Shape the entire platform, your work will create the coherent vision that ties everything together, ensuring that whether a developer is using Socket Open Source, the Firewall, Certified Patches, or any of our other products, they experience clarity and craft. - Lead design as strategy, your design decisions will directly influence how developers understand and interact with supply chain security. You'll think in systems, define design primitives that scale across our platform, and obsess over the details that separate good products from great ones. - Partner with leadership, your voice will be essential in shaping what we build, how we prioritize, and how we communicate the value of Socket to the world. - Design end-to-end experiences across Socket's product portfolio that make complex security concepts feel approachable and actionable for developers. - Work with the engineering team to develop interfaces that abstract away complexity while preserving the rigor and precision security demands. - Establish and evolve Socket's design system, creating patterns and components that let us move fast without compromising on craft or consistency. - Shape the visual and interaction language that developers associate with Socket, establishing a standard others follow. - Participate in customer conversations to understand how developers actually use our products and where clarity breaks down. - Help define the roadmap and prioritize design opportunities that will have the most impact on adoption and user success. - Be part of hiring and building a world-class design team as we grow. What You'll Bring - You've shipped products at a high bar and understand the difference between surface-level polish and systems-level clarity. - Deep experience designing for developers or technical audiences, you understand the contexts where clarity really matters. - Portfolio that demonstrates systems thinking: how you've defined design languages, built component systems, and maintained consistency across complex products. - Comfort working directly with engineering and product leadership, able to move fast and make decisions without excessive process. - Experience designing security or infrastructure tools is a plus, but not required, what matters is your ability to take complexity and make it clear. - You care about craft. The details matter to you, not because they're decorative but because they're functional. You understand that every pixel, every interaction, every word choice shapes how someone experiences a product. We know how important clarity is when looking for a new role, so we've put together a read-me about the Interview Process at Socket. https://drive.google.com/file/d/131klYMcRGJnuRlEPdSN4MJ4EzCINJTft/view?usp=sharing Benefits: Our benefits are crafted to support you and your family, so you can take care of what matters most and thrive in and outside of work. We offer: - Market competitive salary bands - Meaningful equity program - Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage) - Flexible time-off, holidays, and winter shutdown to rest & recharge - Paid parental leave - Remote-first, with quarterly team off-sites At Socket, we 1. Pursue Excellence: We set ourselves apart by consistently delivering work of exceptional quality and distinction. 2. Move with urgency and focus: We prioritize swift, decisive action. 3. Think rigorously: We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We value alternative perspectives and have constructive discussions. 4. Trust and amplify: We overtrust, always assume good intent, and give specific feedback to help each other improve. 5. Feel a strong sense of ownership: We wear many hats and feel a strong sense of overall ownership of the company and we're non-territorial regarding our nominal domains. 6. Are customer obsessed: We relentlessly prioritize the needs of our customers, striving to exceed their expectations and delight them at every interaction.