Principal Product Designer

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Product Designer based in India.** As a Principal Product Designer, you will define the design vision for complex infrastructure experiences used by engineers, SREs, DevOps practitioners, and platform teams. You will transform dense technical telemetry into intuitive, reliable experiences that help users understand systems and respond effectively during critical incidents. The role combines hands-on product design, systems thinking, user research, and strategic leadership across a broad infrastructure portfolio. You will partner closely with senior product and engineering leaders to shape product direction and connect design initiatives to measurable business outcomes. You will also explore how AI-assisted diagnostics and emerging technologies can improve troubleshooting, anomaly detection, and root-cause analysis. Working across distributed US and India teams, you will raise the design craft bar while influencing products and experiences at significant scale. ### Accountabilities: - Define and lead the product design vision for infrastructure experiences spanning cloud environments, Kubernetes, hosts, network performance, databases, and complex technical telemetry. - Design dashboards, workflows, and data visualizations that reduce cognitive load and help engineers troubleshoot systems effectively, particularly during high-pressure incident response. - Establish coherent, fail-safe interaction patterns across infrastructure products, guiding users through monitoring, investigation, mitigation, and root-cause analysis. - Lead the creation of new product vision with a clear connection to adoption, revenue, customer value, and broader business objectives. - Partner directly with product, engineering, and go-to-market leaders, including senior executive stakeholders, to influence strategic roadmaps and major product decisions. - Develop deep technical fluency in areas such as cloud architecture, container orchestration, network protocols, eBPF-based instrumentation, databases, and observability through continuous collaboration and hands-on exploration. - Plan and conduct user interviews, usability testing, and ongoing research with SREs, platform engineers, DevOps practitioners, and other technical users, translating insights into meaningful product direction. - Drive the integration of AI-assisted diagnostics, anomaly detection, and human-in-the-loop workflows into infrastructure experiences. - Establish and maintain high standards for product design craft, component-based systems, accessibility, interaction patterns, and design consistency across the infrastructure portfolio. - Mentor senior and mid-level designers and provide design leadership beyond a single product team or pod. - Lead large-scale, cross-functional design initiatives and collaborate with principal designers across other product areas to maintain a coherent overall platform experience. - Help mature cross-functional design processes and establish effective collaboration between design, product, and engineering teams working with complex telemetry and technical data. - Build a continuous research and feedback loop that keeps product strategy grounded in real-world operating conditions. - Build strong relationships with senior engineering and product leadership and represent the design organization in strategic discussions. ### Requirements - 12+ years of professional experience in product design, UX design, or a closely related discipline, with a portfolio demonstrating complex, data-heavy B2B SaaS or enterprise products. - Demonstrated intellectual curiosity about technology, with evidence of independently learning unfamiliar technical domains and developing meaningful fluency in complex systems. - Experience designing products for technical audiences such as software engineers, SREs, DevOps practitioners, platform engineers, or similar users, or a strong ability to ramp quickly into these domains. - Strong user research capabilities, including interviews, usability testing, synthesis, and the ability to use research findings to materially influence product direction. - Advanced proficiency with Figma and experience building or contributing to component-based design systems at scale, with the ability to think in systems rather than isolated screens or features. - Strong understanding of WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards and assistive technologies, including the ability to independently identify accessibility issues and mentor other designers in accessible design practices. - Proven ability to connect design initiatives to measurable business outcomes, KPIs, and OKRs, including experience demonstrating revenue or adoption impact rather than relying solely on usability metrics. - Strong written and verbal English communication skills and comfort collaborating across US and India time zones. - Demonstrated ability to operate independently across multiple teams and navigate complex organizational environments. - Experience partnering directly with VP- or SVP-level product and engineering stakeholders on strategic initiatives. - A visible professional presence within the design community through activities such as conferences, writing, mentorship, or other contributions beyond an individual employer. - Direct experience with observability, infrastructure monitoring, cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI, or adjacent developer-facing technologies is advantageous. - Experience designing AI-assisted or LLM-based products and familiarity with AI-native design and development tools such as Figma AI, Cursor, or Claude Code is a plus. - Working knowledge of frontend fundamentals such as HTML, CSS, and React is beneficial for effective collaboration and engineering handoff. - Strong facilitation skills for cross-functional design sprints, workshops, and strategic alignment sessions. ### Benefits - Opportunity to define design vision for complex infrastructure and observability experiences used by highly technical customers. - Significant strategic influence across product, engineering, and broader platform initiatives. - Direct exposure to emerging AI-assisted diagnostics, anomaly detection, and AI-native product experiences. - Opportunity to work on complex data visualization, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, databases, and related technical domains. - Close partnership with senior product and engineering leadership on initiatives with measurable customer and business impact. - Ability to establish design standards, influence design systems, and raise the craft bar across a broad product area. - Mentorship and leadership opportunities across senior and mid-level design talent. - Flexible remote working model based in India, with close collaboration across US and India teams. - Inclusive and collaborative environment that values diverse perspectives, nontraditional career paths, and authentic contributions. - Opportunity to participate in large-scale, cross-functional initiatives and collaborate with design leaders across multiple product areas. - Salary, healthcare, paid leave, and other employment benefits are determined by the hiring company and discussed during the recruitment process.