VP of Product Design

Summary

Join UpGuard as VP of Product Design and lead a growing team, shaping a world-class user experience across all touchpoints. Scale the design system, drive AI tool adoption, and collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Brand teams. Craft and socialize a compelling design vision, establish a design-system roadmap, and define success metrics. Build and scale a modern design system, formalizing governance, documentation, and contributor workflows. Lead and empower the design team by hiring, mentoring, and providing coaching and feedback. Integrate AI into the design workflow by identifying and deploying generative-AI tools. Collaborate cross-functionally to ship features that delight users and translate complex concepts into simple experiences. This role requires proven leadership experience, a track record of impact, design-system expertise, and strong collaboration skills.

Requirements

• Proven leadership: Multiple years leading product-design teams (Director/Head/VP level), ideally in a high-growth B2B software environment, but we value exceptional accomplishments regardless of sector
• Track record of impact: Clear examples where your leadership elevated product usability, visual quality, or speed of delivery
• Design-system expertise: Experience building or scaling a component library and token system in Figma (or similar)
• AI mindset: Familiarity with generative-AI tools and a passion for integrating them into design workflows
• Collaboration skills: Excellent communication and influence across Product, Engineering, and Brand teams
• User-centred craft: Ability to pair data-driven insights with strong product-thinking and interaction-design chops
• Domain exposure: Experience in B2B SaaS is highly valued; cybersecurity familiarity is a bonus but not mandatory
• Location: Must be based on Australia’s east coast (AEST/AEDT time zone) and able to work remotely or from our optional offices

Responsibilities

• Lead and accelerate the evolution of our token-driven Figma design system, formalising governance, documentation, and contributor workflows
• Formalise design-ops processes (versioning, governance, documentation) so patterns remain consistent as the suite grows
• Ensure collaboration with Brand & Marketing Design to keep visual language unified
• Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of Product Designers
• Provide coaching, clear career paths, and effective feedback loops so designers produce their best work
• Foster a culture of rapid prototyping, user testing, and measurable learning
• Identify and deploy generative-AI tools (e.g. for ideation, content, asset generation) that streamline designer workflows
• Partner with Engineering and Product teams to experiment with AI-driven UX patterns inside the product itself
• Collaborate daily with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Support to ship features that delight users
• Translate complex cybersecurity concepts into simple, intuitive experiences
• Balance strategic initiatives with hands-on design reviews and execution oversight
• Craft and socialise a compelling design vision that aligns with UpGuard’s product strategy and brand
• Establish a design-system roadmap that scales across multiple products and future use cases
• Define success metrics e.g. adoption of the design system, usability/NPS increases, reduction in design-to-dev cycle time and report progress to executives

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated success introducing AI-assisted processes that measurably improved design velocity or quality
• Experience scaling design orgs from single-product to multi-product platforms
• Contributions to open-source or public design systems
• Familiarity with accessibility best practices and inclusive-design methodologies

Benefits

• Monthly Lifestyle subsidy: use this for financial, physical and mental wellbeing (all regions)
• WFH set-up allowance: to ensure you have the right environment to work in, we will help you get set up within your first 3 months at UpGuard (all regions)
• $1500 USD annual Learning & Development allowance: to support your career development all team members will be able to expense development opportunities against this allowance (all regions)
• Generous Annual Leave/PTO allowances: time to recharge your batteries (all regions)
• 18 weeks paid Parental Leave: irrespective of parenting role (all regions)
• Personal Leave allowance: this includes sick & carer’s leave (all regions)
• Fully remote working environment: whilst we have physical offices in Sydney & Hobart, we do not mandate compulsory attendance (all regions)
• Top-spec hardware: all team members will be provided with top-spec laptops for their role (all regions)