Senior Director of Design

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.  As the Senior Director of Design, Governance & Compliance at Vanta, you'll lead design for our largest product pillar. You'll set the direction for how compliance work moves from manual workflows to agents that do the work alongside our customers. Governance & Compliance is the core of Vanta. It covers the frameworks, controls, policies, audits, and org structures that thousands of companies use to run their security programs. Those companies range from founders getting their first SOC2 to global enterprises managing hundreds of controls. As we move upmarket, the team's job is to make that complexity feel simple for every customer, at every size. You’ll lead a team of senior, staff, and principal designers, with senior managers and directors reporting to you. You'll report to the Head of Design and partner as a peer with product and engineering leadership for the pillar. We're not starting from scratch. Vanta Agent works across the product, customers build and deploy their own custom agents, and our designers prototype and ship to production with our own AI design harness. Your job is to make that the way the whole pillar works. What you’ll do as a Senior Director of Design at Vanta: - Lead the agentic direction for Governance & Compliance. Build on the agents we've already shipped, define what comes next, and shape how people and agents work together across the pillar - Own design quality across the pillar. Set the bar, drive consistency from concept to ship, and get into the details yourself when it matters - Design for platform and enterprise complexity. Lead the team through cross-cutting decisions on scoping, segmentation, org units, permissions, and multi-entity audits so the system holds together across surfaces - Bring AI into how the team works. Build on our design harness, help every designer prototype and ship faster, and keep craft high as speed goes up - Lead and grow leaders. Develop your design leaders and senior ICs, build a high-trust team, and hire well as the pillar grows - Partner as a peer with product and engineering. Co-own outcomes and quality with your counterparts, not just the design work How to be successful in this role: - You've shipped agentic or AI-forward products and have a point of view on how design changes when outputs are non-deterministic - You use AI hands-on in your own process, from prototyping to building in a harness or in code, and you bring your team along - You have deep enterprise B2B SaaS experience. You understand custom configurations, multi-org workflows, and large deployments, and you've made complex products feel simple - You think in systems, designing object models and patterns that hold up across many surfaces, not just individual flows - You're comfortable going deep with engineers in a technical, domain-heavy space like GRC - You've led teams of 12 or more, including design directors, design managers, and staff ICs, and you move easily between strategy and the details - You have a portfolio showing how you've simplified complex products and shipped AI-forward experiences (required for interview) - 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 - Use AI in day-to-day work to amplify your skills and strengthen your outcomes, applying it acr