Senior Product Designer, Design Systems

Headway; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Headway is seeking a senior design systems designer to join our Helix team in San Francisco. You’ll lead visual craft, system thinking, and contribute tokens, theming, and documentation to empower multiple product teams.

You’ll partner with product designers and engineers, advocate accessible patterns, and help migrate components. The role blends hands-on design and system architecture, with opportunity for equity and a comprehensive rewards package.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing digital products, including at least two on a design system used by multiple teams.
• Lead on visual craft and advocate for it across the team. Typography, spacing, color, states, and density are the details you care about getting right.
• You’re energized by being the person who unblocks others, and you can tell the difference between a one-off request and a signal about a gap in the system.
• You like making the system legible. Clear documentation and well-chosen patterns are how you scale your own work.

Responsibilities

• Component design: Design flexible, scalable components and hold the bar on typography, spacing, color, states, and density.
• Tokens and theming: Shape the semantic token architecture and theming spec across surfaces.
• Documentation: Write documentation a designer, an engineer, and a coding agent can each act on.
• Partnership with product teams: Work with product designers and engineers on design system needs and migrations.
• Accessibility: Champion accessibility and hold Helix to that bar.

Skills

Design systems

Visual design

Cross-functional collaboration

React

Tools

Figma

Tailwind CSS

Design tokens

Job description

1 in 4 people in the US have a treatable mental health condition, but most providers don’t accept insurance, making therapy too expensive for most people. Headway’s mission is to fix this by building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. We started by solving the biggest barrier to care: insurance. The admin work - credentialing, claims, payment reconciliation - is a nightmare. We’ve automated that.

But we’re going further. Over 75,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 1 million patients. We are building the best tools for therapists to run their entire practice, reimagining the experience of finding a therapist, and investing in the platform foundations to enable this at scale. We aren’t just a billing layer; we are becoming the platform where care actually happens.

We’re a Series D company with $325M+ in funding (a16z, Accel, Spark Capital, etc.), looking for exceptional people to help us achieve this mission. We want your time here to be the most meaningful experience of your career. Join us, and help change mental healthcare for the better.

About Design Systems at Headway

Our design system Helix enables two sides of our product: our consumer marketplace helping patients find therapists, and our EHR that helps therapists run their day to day practice. It supports a broad range of use cases from engaging brand moments, consumer apps, and a SAAS product. We have a large product organization that is eager to leverage Helix, and they’re looking for a strong design system partner to help raise the level of craft across the whole experience.

Our design team works AI-first. Designers use Claude Code and Claude Design to prototype and stay involved through launch and iteration. We want to build a design system that empowers teams to use Helix with AI tooling, and think differently about how we build a system to support AI first workflows.

We’re currently rebuilding Helix from the ground up this year across all our tokens, components, and documentation. This is an exciting moment to shape the new direction for how Helix evolves.

About the Role

You’ll be the second designer on Design Systems, partnering closely with our design systems lead. You’re someone who holds a high bar on design craft and has the technical depth to back it up. You lead with design: visual craft, systems thinking, and a point of view on quality. You also understand how the system gets built, from the way tokens are structured to how a component API holds up once every product team is building on it. You feel at home in React and Tailwind, and you’re comfortable building the simpler components yourself.

In this role, you will:

• Component design: Design flexible, scalable components and hold the bar on typography, spacing, color, states, and density. Ship specs an engineer can build from without a follow-up meeting, and Figma library components with variants and properties wired up.

• Tokens and theming: Shape the semantic token architecture and the theming spec that maps it across surfaces with very different needs, from a consumer marketplace to a dense internal ops tool.

• Documentation: Write documentation a designer, an engineer, and a coding agent can each act on.

• Partnership with product teams: Work with product designers and engineers on their design system needs, advocate for the right ways to use Helix, and write the migration plans teams follow when a component changes shape.

• Accessibility: Champion accessibility and hold Helix to that bar.

You’ll be a great fit if you:

• 5+ years designing digital products, including at least two on a design system used by multiple teams.

• You lead on visual craft and advocate for it across the team. Typography, spacing, color, states, and density are the details you care about getting right.

• You’re energized by being the person who unblocks others, and you can tell the difference between a one-off request and a signal about a gap in the system.

• You like making the system legible. Clear documentation and well-chosen patterns are how you scale your own work.

Compensation and Benefits:

The expected base pay range for this position is $180,000 - $225,000, based on a variety of factors including qualifications, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for an equity grant, depending on the position and level.

We are committed to offering a comprehensive and competitive total rewards package, including robust health and wellness benefits, retirement savings, and meaningful ownership opportunities through equity. Compensation decisions are made holistically, ensuring fairness and alignment with market benchmarks while recognizing individual contributions and potential.

• Benefits offered include:

We believe a team’s strength is in its people, and we cannot achieve this mission without a team that reflects the diversity of this problem – across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, national origin, religion, family status, disability, military status, and experience. Headway is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Headway will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please inform the recruiter when they contact you to schedule your interview.

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