Staff Visual Designer - Design Systems

In this role, you’ll:

• Redefine and ship large, foundational improvements to Mercury’s design language (things like type, color, and iconography) that scale beautifully across every product surface.
• Partner with Brand and other craft leaders to bring expressive moments into the product and set direction for how brand and product visual language work together.
• Set the craft bar for the design org: define what excellent looks like, and build the systems, guidelines, and references that make it repeatable.
• Actively coach product designers on their craft, giving direct feedback that raises the quality bar across both individual work and the design system itself.
• Partner with design systems designers and engineers to make sure visual decisions translate cleanly into scalable, maintainable components.
• Represent design systems and visual craft in conversations with Brand, Engineering, and design leadership.

What you’ll bring:

• 10+ years of experience in visual design, with deep expertise in typography, color systems, and iconography at a product or brand scale.
• A portfolio that shows range: foundational systems work as well as high-craft, expressive visual design.
• Not just taste, but conviction and language to articulate what makes something successful.
• A track record of coaching or mentoring other designers, with a clear point of view on what strong craft looks like and how to teach it.
• Systems thinking, you’re comfortable balancing expressive visual design with the pragmatic needs of a scalable design system for a data rich product.
• Strong stakeholder management, comfortable winning buy-in from executives and cross-functional leaders on high-visibility work, backed by conviction.
• Strong communication and presence: able to set direction, build alignment, and defend opinionated design decisions with both designers and engineers.
• Proficient in design tools and front-end prototyping with React; comfortable working closely with engineers on how visual systems get built and maintained in code. Affinity for AI-assisted prototyping. Motion design skills are a plus.