Staff Product Designer, Modern Compute

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer to join Modern Compute, with an initial focus on Containers Autoscaling. Autoscaling helps engineering teams make better decisions about how their applications and infrastructure use resources. Designing these experiences requires making deeply technical systems understandable, helping customers act with confidence, and fitting into the tools and workflows they already use.

What it asks for · 10

• You have 10+ years of experience designing complex web-based products, including experience operating at a Staff level or in a role with comparable scope.
• You bring exceptional interaction and visual design craft, particularly in dense, technical, or data-heavy experiences.
• You have led ambiguous product work where the direction was not already defined and your involvement changed the outcome.
• You can simplify complex systems for expert users without watering down how those systems work.
• You are comfortable working closely with product managers and engineers throughout the product development process.
• You communicate complex ideas clearly and can build confidence in a direction across design, product, engineering, and senior leadership.
• You think beyond an individual feature and can create systems or patterns that work across products and teams.
• You balance long-term product direction with hands-on execution and attention to detail.
• You actively mentor other designers and help improve the quality of work around you.
• You can design and build code-based prototypes using AI and coding agents, or have demonstrated the ability to quickly develop that capability.

Also a plus

• Experience designing infrastructure, observability, cloud, or developer tools.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, containers, autoscaling, GitOps, YAML, or related infrastructure workflows.
• Experience designing products for SREs, platform engineers, or application developers.
• Experience working across a multi-product SaaS platform.
• Experience creating design patterns that were adopted by multiple teams.

What the job covers

• Lead end-to-end product design for Modern Compute, initially focused on our Autoscaling product.
• Help define the product direction for an area that is still evolving, from early framing and exploration through detailed design and delivery.
• Design clear, trustworthy experiences for engineers making high-stakes decisions about infrastructure reliability, performance, and cost.
• Simplify complex technical concepts without removing the detail and control expert users need.
• Work closely with product and engineering leaders to identify the right problems, make decisions clearer, and connect work across multiple teams.
• Set a high bar for interaction and visual design, including complex states, data-heavy workflows, and edge cases.
• Create reusable patterns that improve consistency across Modern Compute and the broader Datadog product.
• Mentor other designers through critique, feedback, and hands-on partnership.
• Design and build realistic prototypes in code using coding agents, while applying good judgment about when other tools or levels of fidelity are more appropriate.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• product19×
• design10×
• experience10×
• complex7×
• infrastructure6×
• autoscaling5×
• direction5×
• systems5×
• workflows5×
• build4×
• closely4×
• decisions4×
• designer4×
• engineering4×
• engineers4×
• modern compute4×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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