Director of Design, Design Systems

The Problems You'll Solve

At Carta, our employees set out on a mission to unlock the power of equity ownership for more people in more places. We believe that the problems we solve today unlock the opportunities of tomorrow. Carta is in search of an experienced Director of Design Systems to join an exceptional bench of Design Leaders responsible for creating and shipping innovative digital product experiences across the company. We are looking for a Director who is visionary in approach, can advance our design system strategy, advocate for design excellence and quality across many diverse teams, and effectively lead a team of designers and design technologists to significant impact across Carta.

Our ideal candidate is savvy, curious, enjoys working cross-functionally, and can masterfully communicate vision to leadership. They can advocate for the nerdiness of design craft in addition to the business case of a given design direction. This person must be a self-starter who can work through ambiguity to define key initiatives, lead teams through projects from start to finish, and align the broader R&D organization around these initiatives. We are looking for someone who can inspire fellow designers and stakeholders, and lead with both user empathy and conviction.

As a Design Director, you will play a crucial role throughout the organization— influencing the future of Carta products. You’ll have the opportunity to design for a range of customer and user archetypes including: company founders, employees vesting equity, investors, law firms, tax experts, and our Carta service and delivery colleagues.

Additionally you will:

• Develop and evangelize the overall strategy of our design systems evolution, ensuring it’s focused on making an impact on our products
• Ship with speed and consistency, while setting the future vision
• Get your hands dirty to lead workshops and key projects that advance our design system
• Align cross-functional stakeholders and executives on the importance of design systems and the value of ongoing work
• Promote design excellence and quality standards across all products through collaborative efforts with your team and the broader product design organization.
• Partner with PM and Engineering Leads to create a holistic system that works well for both our customers and our internal teams and establish approaches to measure the effectiveness of the system
• Hire, retain and develop a bar-raising design team
• Contribute to building a strong human centered design culture

About You

The ideal candidate is passionate about building intuitive solutions for complex problems that provide direct value to users and enjoys driving strategy, ideation, prioritization, problem solving, and product delivery. If that sounds like you, we would love to talk to you. In our search, we’re prioritizing: 

• 12+ years of product design experience, with at least 5 years focused on design systems
• A strong portfolio of case studies that demonstrate a deep understanding of design systems and  successful track record of execution across multiple products and platforms 
• Experience leading and managing a Design System team at a similarly sized organization and design systems ‘maturity level’
• Deep expertise in UI/UX craft; passion for visual design, interaction details, typography, accessibility, and pixel perfect deliverables
• Strategic, systems thinker who can work at various altitudes as needed
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills that allow you to convey the strategic value of design systems to executives and across the organization
• Experience influencing and educating cross-functional teams 
• Understanding that managing/leading can also mean actively contributing to team projects
• Technically proficient in building and scaling systems across platforms; from figma to code
• Familiarity with latest developments in design systems and tools; figma, storybook, github etc
• Ability to work in a dynamic environment — balancing rigor and scrappiness.
• High comfort level with ambiguity; openness to critique from other disciplines and curiosity to learn from a spectrum of perspectives.
• Passion for mentoring designers and teaching about design craft and quality
• Experience actively managing designers at different stages of their careers
• Nice-to-have: experience with finance or either the venture capital or private equity space

Salary

Carta’s compensation package includes a market competitive salary, equity for all full time roles, exceptional benefits, and, for applicable roles, commissions plans. Our minimum cash compensation (salary + commission if applicable) range for this role is: 

• $225,000 - $300,000 [San Francisco, CA; Santa Clara, CA, New York, NY] 
• $202,000 - $270,000 point in [Seattle, WA] 

Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on geography, candidate experience and expertise, and other factors.