Staff Product Designer, Console Experience

DigitalOcean

$192K — $241K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of product design experience, particularly with design systems.
  • Strong understanding of systems thinking in design for reuse and consistency.
  • Comprehensive skillset in interaction, visual, and information design demonstrated via an impactful portfolio.
  • Proven ability to influence quality adoption across teams through collaboration, not authority.
  • Experience acting as the primary designer, navigating ambiguity confidently.
  • A clear, assertive design vision with the capacity to steer creative direction.
  • Practical collaboration experience with engineers, ideally with a grasp of front-end constraints.

Responsibilities

  • Own the entire console design experience from user login to daily workflows.
  • Manage the design system as a product, overseeing the component library and setting its future direction.
  • Establish high standards for product design quality and implement a review process to maintain these standards.
  • Develop reusable design patterns to support various product teams in achieving cohesive UI.
  • Oversee critical shared interfaces like navigation and onboarding, serving as a model for other teams.
  • Collaborate with engineering to ensure design execution aligns with intentions, enhancing the skills of UI engineers through mentorship.
  • Advocate for a user-friendly experience backed by evidence to promote further design investment.
  • Define and maintain the creative vision for the console, ensuring it reflects a distinct aesthetic and usability standard.

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model offering flexibility between office and remote work.
  • Opportunity to influence and lead design practices across multiple teams.
  • Access to a collaborative environment with diverse product teams and engineering.
Full Job Description
DigitalOcean's console is where every customer, from a solo developer to an enterprise platform team, comes to provision, manage, and scale their infrastructure. We're looking for a designer to own that experience end to end: the navigation, the cross-product patterns, the moments where a dozen product teams' features have to feel like one coherent product.

You'll sit on a product team, and use that vantage point to build the reusable frameworks, patterns, and guidance that every team working in the console relies on, while holding the broader view of how the console works as a system. This is a role for someone who can zoom from a single dialog to the entire information architecture and back, often in the same week.
What you'll do
  • Own the end-to-end design of the console experience, from first login through daily workflows for their users entire experience.
  • Treat the design system itself as the product: own the component library, patterns, and visual/interaction standards every team builds on, and plan its roadmap jointly with the engineering team.
  • Set the craft and quality bar for the whole product suite, plus a review process that holds it in place, so consistent, polished UI is the normal outcome rather than something each team has to fight for on its own.
  • Build reusable, high-leverage patterns instead of custom screens per team, so product teams can ship well-designed UI without needing a dedicated designer of their own.
  • Own the highest-visibility shared surfaces (navigation, onboarding, app shell, landing pages) as the reference examples other teams design against.
  • Work closely with engineering to make sure designs land in the product as intended, and grow the design skills of the UI engineers embedded on product teams through a design guild, reviews, and pairing.
  • Make simplicity and strong UX a real point of differentiation again, and back up requests for more design investment with evidence of where it will pay off.
  • Own the creative vision for the console: bring a clear, opinionated point of view on what the experience should look and feel like, not just the systems that keep it consistent.
What we're looking for
  • Staff-level product design experience with a proven track record of building and scaling a design system across many products or teams.
  • A systems thinker who designs for reuse and consistency at scale rather than one-off screens, and understands the leverage that good patterns create.
  • Strong, well-rounded craft across interaction, visual, and information design, backed by a portfolio that shows both taste and measurable UX impact.
  • A history of driving quality and adoption through influence rather than authority, working across dozens of teams via standards, partnership, and persuasion.
  • Comfort being the most senior (and possibly only) designer in the room, setting direction under ambiguity.
  • A strong, opinionated point of view on design, and the conviction to own the creative direction of the product rather than just its consistency.
  • Solid collaboration with engineers, with hands-on knowledge of front-end constraints and how design systems actually live in code as a strong plus.
Nice to have
  • Experience running or scaling a design system guild or community of practice across a large engineering org.
  • Familiarity with cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, storage, networking, Kubernetes) or a track record of ramping up quickly on technical domains.
  • Experience designing for both novice and expert users within the same product.
Compensation Range:
  • $192,800 - $241,000

*This is a hybrid role



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