Senior 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 but all employees work remotely 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.

The Role

You'll be Sparrow's first product designer. You'll own design across our leave management product and help shape a new product lines, from research through shipped workflows.

You'll report to our Head of Product. You'll work closely with PMs, engineers, and the in-house leave specialists who are experts in this domain and use our tools every day.

What to know before you apply

• You'll be our only designer for a while. We plan to hire a second designer, but we don't have a fixed date. [Decide: whether this role leads design as the team grows.]

• Your manager isn't a designer. Our Head of Product has been a department of one before and will support your growth directly. [If approved: we'll also fund an external design mentor and time for your design community.]

• We don't have a design system, and parts of the product aren't pretty yet. We want someone who sees that as an opportunity to improve things step by step, not a reason to start over.

• Leave is complicated. Rules vary by state, cases involve waiting on doctors and HR, and privacy law shapes who can see what. The "happy path" is the easy part, but it's not common.

• We ship good, not perfect. PMs and engineers here will sometimes bring you prototypes, including ones built with AI tools. We want a designer who treats that as a head start.

What you'll do

• Research. Talk with employees, HR administrators and senior HR leaders at our customers, and our own specialists. Run scrappy discovery (interviews, workflow mapping, prototype tests) and turn it into decisions.

• Design multi-party workflows. Employees, HR administrators, managers, and Sparrow specialists all touch the same case. Design for their states, permissions, exceptions, and what happens while everyone waits.

• Help build new product lines from the ground up, alongside Product and Engineering.

• Improve what's already there. Refine existing pages and flows without stopping to overhaul everything.

• Start the patterns that become our design system, as you go rather than as a separate project.

• Explain your thinking. Share rationale, tradeoffs, and decisions clearly in writing and in person across the company.

About you

• Typically 4 or more years of product design experience, with shipped work in complex, workflow-heavy products. Examples: B2B SaaS, benefits, HR, healthcare, insurance, fintech, or government services.

• You've worked with a lot of independence, ideally as the only designer or one of the first on a team or at a company.

• You've planned and run research yourself, and you're comfortable in front of customers, including senior stakeholders.

• You're pragmatic. You know when good enough is right, and you can explain where you drew the line.

• You get curious, not overwhelmed, when a domain turns out to be complicated.

• You pick up new tools, including AI tools, when they help you move faster.

• You keep growing as a designer without a design team around you, through communities, mentors, or your own habits.

• You write and speak clearly.

Nice to have

• Experience with leave, benefits, healthcare, or other regulated workflows.

• Experience with products used by both an employer and its employees.

Compensation

• This is a full-time, exempt position. Compensation is $156,200 at the national average, but can range from $139,018-$171,820 based on your state of residence.

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 40 states and counting. To learn more about the Sparrow team and its benefits, check out our careers page.