The posting
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.
We are seeking a Staff Product Designer for the Activation team in our Self-Serve group. For a startup, getting SOC2 and ISO compliant is often the first serious security milestone, and it can stall for months. Activation exists to change that: we want every startup that signs up for Vanta to reach audit-ready in days, not months with an AI.
The Activation team is responsible for helping customers get key value out of the product after they purchase. When customers get that value, they're more likely to retain and grow. Activation is an experimentation team, an execution team, and a collaborative platform team - influencing how the rest of the company does growth and designs for a consistent growth experience.
As the Staff Product Designer on Activation, you'll set the experience vision for how customers get compliant with Vanta and you'll carry it from strategy to shipped product. You'll own work that spans multiple quarters, shape the roadmap with your PM and engineering partners, and set direction in a space where the right answer isn't obvious yet. You'll proactively champion craft, best growth experience practices, and a data centric approach to design. You'll also document the strategy and lead the room: sometimes authoring briefs that define our bets, and running stakeholder forums that keep large initiatives moving.
You will report to a Design Manager on the Self-Serve design team, within Vanta's Experience Design organization.
What you’ll do as a Staff Product Designer at Vanta:
- Set the end-to-end experience vision for Activation, from first login to to activation and turn it into a roadmap work your squad can ship cycle by cycle.
- Act as a key driver of product shape and roadmap alongside your PM and EM, bringing a clear design point of view backed by customer evidence and data.
- Design agent-first experiences: decide what the Vanta Agent does on its own, where people review and approve, and how the product earns trust at each step.
- Create new, reusable AI patterns and extend existing ones, so other teams can build guided, agentic experiences faster and more consistently.
- Define the activation outcomes your work is accountable for, partner with Data to instrument them, and run the experiments and iterations that move them.
- Lead customer discovery with cross functional partners and lean engineering teams and share what you learn with leadership in a clear, compelling narrative.
- Align partner teams so growth experiences feel like one product, not an org chart.
- Document the product strategy for your area: write briefs, and POV docs that frame the problem, the bet, and the plan, so partners can make decisions without you in the room.
- Drive large, multi-team initiatives from kickoff to launch in partnership with your Activation squad: set up and run recurring reviews and working sessions with key stakeholders, track decisions and dependencies, and keep everyone aligned as plans change.
- Raise the quality bar for interaction, visual, and content craft across Self-Serve through critique, mentorship, and close partnership with engineering through launch.
- Help grow the design team by mentoring other designers and helping uphold the hiring bar.
How to be successful in this role:
- 8+ years of experience designing and shipping high-quality B2B SaaS products, including work that spans multiple teams and quarters.
- A track record of designing for business outcomes such as activation, onboarding completion, time-to-value, or retention, and the ability to say where the number started and where it landed.
- Experience shipping AI-powered or automation-heavy products, with a strong point of view on how people and agents should work together.
- Proven ability to set direction in ambiguous, high-stakes problem spaces: you frame the problem, write the brief, make principled tradeoffs, and bring a clear position to the table.
- Strong written strategy skills. You've authored product briefs, strategy docs, or roadmaps that leadership used to make real decisions.
- Experience leading large-scale, cross-functional initiatives, including running the recurring meetings, reviews, and rituals that keep many stakeholders aligned and work moving.
- Fluency with product analytics and experimentation. You define success metrics, design tests, and change course based on results, including the ones you didn't want.
- Exceptional interaction, visual, and content craft on dense, complex product UI, plus experience building patterns that scale across teams.
- Strong storytelling and communication skills. You can align a squad, partner teams, and executives around a direction, and keep momentum through setbacks.
- Experience working through and alongside other designers to deliver larger efforts, and a habit of mentoring and giving candid, useful feedback.
- A portfolio is required, showing end-to-end product work, the reasoning behind key decisions, and the outcomes it delivered.
- Experience with product-led growth, onboarding, or guided-setup experiences, especially for small teams or founders.
- Experience designing agentic workflows, conversational interfaces, or human-in-the-loop review flows.
- Comfort prototyping in code or with AI tools to test ideas quickly with customers and partners.
- Familiarity with security, compliance, or GRC. It helps, but it isn't required: many of our designers learned the domain on the job.
- Uses AI in day-to-day work to amplify their skills and strengthen their outcomes, applying it across routine workflows, actively building fluency through experimentation, and exercising sound judgment to ensure AI-assisted work meets a high quality bar.
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.
