Staff Product Designer, Console Experience

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Designer to own the end-to-end console experience. This role involves designing the navigation, cross-product patterns, and ensuring the console feels like a coherent product for all users, from solo developers to enterprise teams. The designer will sit on a product team, focusing on building reusable frameworks, patterns, and guidance that all console teams rely on, while maintaining a holistic view of the console as a system. This position requires the ability to shift focus from detailed elements like dialogs to the broader information architecture.

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

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.