Staff Product Designer
Lead design strategy for Datadog's APM product, creating intuitive experiences for engineers working with complex distributed systems, observability, and debugging workflows. Requires 10+ years designing technical products and strong systems thinking.
About the job
What You’ll Do
- Become a design leader within APM by proactively identifying opportunities and shaping the design strategy across multiple product areas and workflows.
- Partner closely with PMs and engineers to design intuitive experiences for highly technical systems, balancing user needs with platform scalability and engineering constraints.
- Drive end-to-end product thinking across onboarding, instrumentation, troubleshooting, debugging, runtime analysis, and performance investigation workflows.
- Navigate ambiguity and help define product direction through research, systems thinking, prototyping, and iterative execution.
- Use AI-assisted workflows and prototyping tools to rapidly explore ideas, validate concepts, and accelerate iteration throughout the design process.
- Collaborate closely with engineering teams through implementation, prototyping interactions in code when appropriate and refining product quality directly in production-like environments.
- Bridge the gap between technical requirements and user needs, advocating for customers while influencing strategic product decisions.
- Conduct and synthesize qualitative and quantitative research to identify pain points, validate solutions, and guide roadmap decisions.
- Communicate design rationale clearly and persuasively across design, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
- Mentor and support other designers by providing feedback, sharing frameworks and workflows, and helping raise the overall quality bar across the organization.
- Contribute to the evolution of modern AI-enabled design workflows, helping teams rethink how products are explored, prototyped, and shipped.
Who You Are
- 10+ years of experience in digital product design.
- Portfolio demonstrates a strong track record of designing and shipping complex technical products and systems-oriented workflows.
- Experience designing for developer platforms, observability tools, infrastructure products, or other highly technical domains.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments and influencing product direction through strong systems thinking and product judgment.
- Demonstrated experience conducting research, synthesizing insights, and influencing product strategy across cross-functional teams.
- Track record of telling compelling stories that build alignment, influence stakeholders, and articulate a clear product and design vision.
- Deeply thoughtful about edge cases, scalability, information architecture, and designing for technical depth without sacrificing usability.
- Proactively lead initiatives from concept to execution, balancing priorities and navigating complex stakeholder environments.
- Thrive in cross-functional collaboration and comfortable working closely with engineers throughout implementation.
- Fluent in modern design and prototyping tools, and actively explore AI-assisted workflows to improve iteration speed, prototyping, implementation collaboration, and product quality.
- Interested in evolving how design teams work through code-aware tooling, AI-assisted prototyping, and emerging design-engineering workflows.
- Give and receive feedback well, and proactively mentor other designers to elevate the quality of the broader team.
Skills
Figma, Prototyping, User Research, Systems Thinking, Information Architecture, Ai-Assisted Design Tools, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Stakeholder Communication, Mentorship, Technical Product Design
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