Head of Design (San Francisco)

Our mission is to make world-class software security available to everyone. This means building program analysis tools that are open source, easy to use, powerful, and fast. It also means building a team with security expertise and a passion for great developer experiences. Most of all, it means working with honesty and respect in a diverse community of dreamers and builders. We’ve redefined static analysis tooling by committing to all of these, and turned our project, Semgrep, into an essential safeguard for code at Snowflake, Dropbox, and more.

About the role

Semgrep is on a mission to make security accessible to developers, and design plays a critical role in that vision. We are looking for a Head of Design to lead and scale our design team while driving exceptional user experiences across our web and command-line tools. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will be responsible for ensuring Semgrep’s UX is industry-leading—on par with Stripe and Datadog—while maintaining a solid, intuitive UI.

This is a high-impact role for a hands-on design leader with a strong UX background who is deeply outcome-oriented. You will shape the product experience, work cross-functionally with product and engineering, and drive measurable improvements in usability and adoption.

• Our expectation is that this role will be based in our San Francisco office, coming into the office 2 days a week.

Prior experience in a fast-paced, tech environment is helpful, but we are more interested in your product thinking and data-driven decision-making skills than your pedigree. So if this opportunity excites you but you don’t meet the exact requirements, apply anyway!

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow our design team (currently two designers), fostering a high-performance culture
• Define and execute a UX strategy that drives measurable improvements in product adoption and user success
• Ensure design and product remain tightly aligned by actively participating in product management team meetings
• Maintain a proactive, strategic approach—less than 10% of the team’s work should be reactive to engineering requests
• Deliver at least two major product metric improvements per quarter

Individual Contribution (50%)

• Own the UX for core product workflows, optimizing for speed, efficiency, and task success
• Conduct user research and translate insights into UX flow diagrams and low-fidelity wireframes
• Collaborate with PMs to define and measure in-product success outcomes
• Continuously iterate on UX flows based on real-world usage data
• Leverage AI and other cutting-edge tools to accelerate rapid prototyping and testing

Success in this role means delivering meaningful, measurable improvements to our product’s UX, with 80%+ of work focused on driving key outcomes.

You are ideal for this role if you have

• A deep UX background, with a bias for action—you’d ship a wireframe if it meant achieving 100% task success
• Experience at a world-class product company (e.g., Dropbox, Figma, Facebook) with a track record of delivering concrete, measurable outcomes
• Strong product thinking—you can work as seamlessly with PMs as you do with designers
• A data-driven approach to design, always optimizing for user success
• Excitement about using AI and new technologies to accelerate design and iteration

Compensation

Our compensation package includes equity and benefits in addition to salary.

What we offer

Our goal is to competitively and fairly compensate every Semgrep employee with a system that equally rewards those who are vocal and those who are less comfortable making demands during the final steps of the hiring process. To that end, we generate internal compensation bands that are used when discussing and negotiating salaries. We update these based on market data to make sure they’re above the average for comparable roles.

We also invest in our employees’ well-being and long term success with comprehensive health plans, generous vacation time, 401k, learning stipends, and more. Our benefits are for everyone, so that you’re taken care of, and we work with individuals to make sure they have what they need, whether that’s quiet work space, adjusted hours, or something else.

Who we are

We have people from France and the Philippines, physics and philosophy, formal methods research and full fledged corporations. We’re new parents and new grads, aspiring authors and aspiring Americans, dog lovers and dogfooders. We get together often to bike, bake, and meet up in parks. In our interactions, we believe respect and honesty go hand in hand, and prioritize both.

Semgrep is an equal-opportunity employer seeking a diverse range of backgrounds. We value who you are — including your cultural heritage, your socioeconomic status, your age, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your disabilities. We value what’s vitally important to you — your family, your religion, your politics. We value what you love in this world — your music, your weekend pursuits. We believe in welcoming varied professional backgrounds, educations, and interests. If you’re exceptional in your role, believe in Semgrep’s mission, and treat Semgrep’s values as your own, you belong here.

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