Head of Design

About Semgrep

Semgrep is on a mission to make it expensive to exploit software. As the team behind the most popular SAST, we built the Semgrep AppSec Platform to deliver industry-leading code, dependency, and secrets scanning to enable organizations to ship secure code quickly without slowing down development. 

With fast, customizable code analysis across large codebases, Semgrep helps teams catch vulnerabilities early and fix them faster. Leading companies like Snowflake, Plaid, Figma, Lyft, and Dropbox rely on Semgrep to secure their software.

Semgrep is funded by top investors, including Felicis Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

About the role

Semgrep is on a mission to make security accessible to developers, and design plays a critical role in that vision. We are looking for a Head of Design to lead and scale our design team while driving exceptional user experiences across our web and command-line tools. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will be responsible for ensuring Semgrep’s UX is industry-leading—on par with Stripe and Datadog—while maintaining a solid, intuitive UI.

This is a high-impact role for a hands-on design leader with a strong UX background who is deeply outcome-oriented. You will shape the product experience, work cross-functionally with product and engineering, and drive measurable improvements in usability and adoption.

Location expectations:

• Our expectation is that this role will be based in our San Francisco office, coming into the office 2 days a week.

Prior experience in a fast-paced, tech environment is helpful, but we are more interested in your product thinking and data-driven decision-making skills than your pedigree. So if this opportunity excites you but you don’t meet the exact requirements, apply anyway!

What you’ll do

Leadership & Strategy (50%)

• Lead and grow our design team (currently two designers), fostering a high-performance culture
• Define and execute a UX strategy that drives measurable improvements in product adoption and user success
• Ensure design and product remain tightly aligned by actively participating in product management team meetings
• Maintain a proactive, strategic approach—less than 10% of the team’s work should be reactive to engineering requests
• Deliver at least two major product metric improvements per quarter

Individual Contribution (50%)

• Own the UX for core product workflows, optimizing for speed, efficiency, and task success
• Conduct user research and translate insights into UX flow diagrams and low-fidelity wireframes
• Collaborate with PMs to define and measure in-product success outcomes
• Continuously iterate on UX flows based on real-world usage data
• Leverage AI and other cutting-edge tools to accelerate rapid prototyping and testing

Success in this role means delivering meaningful, measurable improvements to our product’s UX, with 80%+ of work focused on driving key outcomes.

You are ideal for this role if you have

• A deep UX background, with a bias for action—you’d ship a wireframe if it meant achieving 100% task success
• Experience at a world-class product company (e.g., Dropbox, Figma, Facebook) with a track record of delivering concrete, measurable outcomes
• Strong product thinking—you can work as seamlessly with PMs as you do with designers
• A data-driven approach to design, always optimizing for user success
• Excitement about using AI and new technologies to accelerate design and iteration