Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Designer

Location: San Francisco (in office x2/week)

As a Senior Product Designer, you will craft successful, meaningful products that help thousands of developers deliver better applications to their users, faster. We're building in a moment where AI is fundamentally changing how software gets designed and delivered. We're looking for someone who's already there — using AI daily to move faster, think bigger, and ship with more confidence. Just like our users.

The Product Design Role

Product designers at CircleCI have a strong problem-solving process and a demonstrated ability to explain that process. We are curious, ask questions, dig deep into problems, and are excited to learn new things. We are strong visual problem solvers who understand the key elements of visual design including visual hierarchy, layout, typography, color, etc and also have the ability to communicate structure, relationships, and flow through visual assets. We value curiosity and seek every opportunity to engage with customers and utilize design to tackle real user problems.

A successful product designer will have previous experience in developer tools or other complex products. Someone coming into this role should have experience using data analytics, user testing, and research to validate design decisions, as well as experience guiding users through initial discovery to engagement

Our designers are empathetic and collaborative and are able to work well with people from different backgrounds. We advocate for design decisions through data, research, and strong critical thinking, but also engage in participatory discussions, take feedback, and use that feedback to produce the best possible designs for our customers.

This is a key role with the opportunity to contribute holistically to improving the user experience of our product.

The Senior Role

We look to our senior designers to understand the domain and be responsible for the design function for their product areas, think holistically about user journeys across the product, outline design processes, and clarify expectations. They understand their team's domain and share their knowledge frequently with teammates. They mentor junior members of the design team, deliver praise and constructive feedback to teammates and business partners, and actively seek feedback on their own performance.

Senior product designers build positive relationships and help teammates overcome obstacles, contributing to the healthy functioning of the broader organization. Does this describe your own ambitions and values? Check out more details about the role below!

Requirements

• 5+ years of SaaS design experience for technical, developer, or enterprise products
• Proficiency with AI-assisted design and development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) to rapidly prototype and iterate — you're a builder with enough technical fluency to open your own PRs and occasionally ship design changes directly to production
• Familiarity with the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and developer tooling; experience in CI/CD or adjacent DevOps spaces is strongly preferred
• The ability to translate complex technical flows into simple experiences that help users comprehend and progress in the adoption of our product
• Ability to think through sophisticated user problems, propose solutions, mock them up in detail, and work with engineering to build them
• Strong communication of design rationale, regardless of audience
• A bias toward experimentation — you look for unusual and innovative ways to solve problems and enjoy collaborating with engineers to ship small, quick experiments that validate your ideas
• Experience conducting user research and using data analysis to inform decisions
• A portfolio that demonstrates sophisticated and creative UX solutions to technical problems, with a proven grasp of information architecture
• Experience with Lean UX methodologies
• AI fluency as a working practice — you actively incorporate AI into your design workflow, from research synthesis to prototyping to production, and you stay current with how these tools are evolving

Nice to have

• Experience designing for developer channels beyond the web app — API documentation, IDE extensions, or CLI experiences
• Prior experience with CI/CD platforms or build/test/deploy workflows