Staff Product Designer

Job description

Mission To advance the adoption of the Walrus Protocol – a Verifiable Data Platform for AI Builders Vision To create a foundation for AI builders to store and manage their data, making that data persistent, portable, and under their control across apps, providers, and agents. Walrus Foundation is looking for a Staff Product Designer to define and own the product experience for Walrus. Walrus is infrastructure for developers, and designing infrastructure products requires a particular kind of product thinking. Users need to navigate technical concepts, understand system state, work with large amounts of information, configure resources, diagnose problems, and take actions that can have real consequences for their data, storage, or spend. You'll partner closely with product and engineering from the earliest stages of discovery through implementation. You won't receive finished requirements and turn them into screens. You'll help determine which problems matter, investigate how developers actually work, challenge assumptions, prototype and test potential solutions, and ultimately define how developers experience Walrus. As a Staff designer, you'll also establish the systems and standards that allow the product to scale. You'll think beyond individual features to create consistent interaction patterns, reusable components, and product principles that make the entire Walrus experience more coherent over time. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the Walrus product experience. Define and evolve the end-to-end developer experience across Walrus's product surfaces and key workflows. - Lead discovery with product and engineering. Help frame problems before the team jumps to solutions, identify unanswered questions, and determine what evidence we need before committing to build. - Bring developers directly into the design process. Conduct lightweight developer interviews and usability tests, put prototypes in front of real users, and synthesize findings into decisions the team can act on. - Design complex technical workflows. Create flows, wireframes, prototypes, and production-ready designs for experiences involving dense data, system state, configuration, resource management, and high-consequence actions. - Influence product direction. Bring a strong point of view on what Walrus should build—not just how features should look—and constructively challenge product and engineering assumptions when needed. - Build Walrus's design system. Establish and maintain shared components, interaction patterns, and product principles that create consistency and allow the product surface to grow without fragmenting. - Benchmark the market. Regularly tear down comparable developer and infrastructure products to understand established patterns, identify opportunities, and avoid reinventing solved problems. - Stay close through implementation. Partner with engineering throughout development, review what ships against the intended experience, catch problems early, and incorporate requirements and feedback from partners such as Legal. - Raise the design bar. Establish what excellent developer-product design looks like for Walrus and help create the practices that maintain that standard as the organization grows. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8-10 years of product design experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex technical products. - A portfolio demonstrating ownership of shipped developer tools, cloud/infrastructure products, consoles, dashboards, or similarly complex technical products. - Demonstrated ability to simplify technically sophisticated workflows without removing the control or information expert users need. - Strong interaction-design skills across data-heavy interfaces, tables, configuration, complex states, progressive disclosure, permissions, errors, and high-consequence actions. - Experience independently identifying and framing product problems rather than primarily executing against predefined requirements. - A track record of influencing product strategy and roadmap decisions through design. - Strong qualitative research instincts and experience incorporating lightweight user research and usability testing into day-to-day product work. - Experience creating or significantly evolving design systems and reusable interaction patterns. - Strong partnership with engineering and a willingness to remain involved through implementation and design QA. - Excellent communication skills and the confidence to disagree constructively with senior product and engineering partners. - Comfort operating with significant autonomy in an ambiguous, rapidly evolving technical environment.