Lead Product Designer

About us

Sparrow is the first high-tech, high-touch employee leave management solution. Our mission is to make it simple for companies to provide their employees with all kinds of leave (i.e. family, medical, etc.).

Currently, the leave management process is painful and inefficient for everyone. Company leaders struggle to keep up with regulations and processes that change frequently, and the employees going on leave are overwhelmed by bureaucracy at an exceptionally important juncture in their career. Sparrow transforms this ordinarily tedious, error-prone, complex to remain compliant, and time-consuming process into a 30-minute end-to-end experience saving teams time (20 - 40 hours per leave) and money (up to $30K per leave).

Sparrow is headquartered in San Francisco with remote employees across the country. Sparrow is a diverse, highly talented, and supportive team. Together, we are hardworking, collaborative, smart, and humble—after all, we’re solving real problems.

About Us

Sparrow is the first high-tech, high-touch employee leave management solution. Our mission is to make it simple for companies to provide their employees with all kinds of leave (i.e. family, medical, etc.).

Currently, the leave management process is painful and inefficient for everyone. Company leaders struggle to keep up with regulations and processes that change frequently, and the employees going on leave are overwhelmed by bureaucracy at an exceptionally important juncture in their career. Sparrow transforms this ordinarily tedious, error-prone, complex to remain compliant, and time-consuming process into a 30-minute end-to-end experience saving teams time (20 - 40 hours per leave) and money (up to $30K per leave).

Sparrow is headquartered in San Francisco with remote employees across the country. Sparrow is a diverse, highly talented, and supportive team. Together, we are hardworking, collaborative, smart, and humble—after all, we’re solving real problems.

As an early member of the engineering leadership team, you will have a significant opportunity to play a pivotal role in Sparrow’s growth and setting the direction and culture of the engineering team.

The Role

We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to own design for major areas of the product and raise the bar on how Sparrow designs and ships. This is an IC leadership role: you’ll drive end-to-end design, partner deeply with Product and Engineering, and influence strategy, quality, and consistency across the product.

What You’ll Do

In this role you will:

• Own end-to-end design for key product areas—from discovery to flows, UI, interaction details, and shipped outcomes.

• Design for operational complexity: create experiences that handle edge cases, regulatory/program nuance, and real-world processes without overwhelming users.

• Work across multiple personas: understand user goals and context, and craft experiences that feel cohesive even when users have different needs and levels of expertise.

• Partner closely with Product & Engineering to clarify problems, explore solutions, define scope, and ship high-quality work quickly.

• Use research and data pragmatically: run scrappy discovery (interviews, workflow mapping, prototype tests), synthesize insights, and iterate.

• Raise the bar for quality and consistency: contribute to and evolve design patterns/systems that enable speed and coherence.

• Communicate clearly: share rationale, tradeoffs, and decisions in a way that builds alignment across the team.

As an early senior member of the design function, you’ll have meaningful influence on our product direction, customer experience, and how we build.

About You

We’re looking for a product-minded designer who stays close to customers and the details—someone who can simplify complex systems into calm, intuitive experiences.

More specifically, we’re looking for people with:

• 7+ years of product design experience (or equivalent), including shipping meaningful product work.

• Experience designing complex, workflow-heavy products (bonus if the product is operationally complex: fintech/healthcare/HR/payments/insurance/benefits/admin tools, etc.).

• Strong interaction and systems thinking—able to design flows that handle nuance, permissions, states, and exceptions gracefully.

• Comfort working with ambiguity and moving quickly: you can define the problem, propose options, and iterate toward the best solution.

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with PM and Engineering, including shaping scope and making tradeoffs.

• Excellent craft and attention to detail in UI, content, and interaction patterns.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Ultimately, most important to us is someone who is passionate about applying technology to real difficult problems, who loves building beautiful useful products, and who finds our mission compelling.

Why Sparrow?

Our work at Sparrow is impactful. We help People teams with one of the hardest parts of their job, and we support employees at a time when they need it most. We’re driven by our mission, much like a nonprofit, but with the resources and scale of a fast-growing venture-backed company.

Sparrow is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. While we are united by our excitement for the mission and product, the diversity of our experiences is one of our strengths. The Sparrow team is made up of people with all types of backgrounds, and we have teammates in 30 states and counting. To learn more about the Sparrow team and its benefits, check out our careers page.