Staff Product Designer, Console Experience

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Designer to own the end-to-end console experience and its creative direction. The role focuses on building reusable design-system frameworks, setting quality standards across product teams, and partnering with engineering to deliver a coherent, polished experience.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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