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 We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to design thoughtful, high-quality experiences across key areas of the product. You’ll drive end-to-end design processes, partner closely with Product and Engineering, and contribute to improving how Sparrow designs and ships. This is a senior IC role: you’ll take ownership of meaningful product areas, execute with a high degree of autonomy, and help elevate quality and consistency across the product. WHAT YOU’LL DO In this role you will: - Own end-to-end design for product features and workflows—from discovery to flows, UI, interaction details, and shipped outcomes.

• Design for operational complexity: create experiences that handle edge cases, regulatory nuance, and real-world processes without overwhelming users.
• Work across multiple personas: understand user goals and context, and design experiences that feel cohesive across different users 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.
• Contribute to design quality and consistency: apply and help evolve design patterns and systems that enable speed and coherence.
• Communicate clearly: share rationale, tradeoffs, and decisions to build alignment across the EPD team.

• Experience designing complex, workflow-heavy products (bonus if 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.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and moving quickly: you can contribute to problem definition, propose options, and iterate toward strong solutions.
• Strong collaboration skills with Product and Engineering, including participating in scope and tradeoff discussions.
• Excellent craft and attention to detail in UI, content, and interaction patterns.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Highlight how you’ve used Excel for data‑driven design decisions: include a short case study in your portfolio showing a real‑world problem (e.g., workflow bottleneck), the metrics you tracked in Excel (time saved, error reduction), and how those insights shaped the UI/UX solution.
• Build a “Leave Journey” mini‑prototype (Figma/Sketch) that maps a 30‑minute end‑to‑end leave request flow; embed it in your portfolio with annotations that explain how you simplified complex regulatory steps while keeping the experience high‑touch and compliant.
• Emphasize remote collaboration experience: list the specific tools (Miro, FigJam, Slack, Notion) you use to run design critiques, share Excel dashboards, and maintain design systems across time zones; prepare a one‑page “Remote Design Playbook” to share during the interview.
• Prepare to discuss how you stay current on employment‑law changes: mention newsletters, industry forums, or a personal spreadsheet that tracks regulation updates, and be ready to show how you’d translate those updates into design requirements without slowing the product roadmap.
• Tailor your salary negotiation by researching comparable senior product designer roles at remote‑first SaaS firms (e.g., $150‑$190k base + equity). Bring a brief compensation matrix that aligns your Excel‑driven ROI examples (e.g., $30K saved per leave) with the value you’ll deliver to Sparrow’s bottom line.