Senior Product Designer

apollographql.com; United States; Remote; USD 130,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

Apollo GraphQL is seeking a senior designer to own end-to-end design for developer tools, influencing onboarding, product interfaces, and the design system. You will collaborate with engineering and PMs to shape scope, ship v1 experiences, and iterate based on usage, aiming to improve developer activation and reduce friction.

The role emphasizes designing for complex technical workflows, maintaining trust through detail-oriented design, and contributing to reusable design system patterns.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing software, with a focus on product or UX design.
• A portfolio of shipped work.
• Experience designing complex products, ideally for technical users: developer tools, infrastructure, data, security, identity, or APIs.
• A track record of owning features or workflows end to end, from discovery through shipping.
• Strong visual design, interaction, and craft skills.
• Comfortable working through ambiguity within a defined problem area.
• Have shipped developer-focused experiences, API tooling, or agent experiences.
• Experience contributing to a design system, and knowing when to work outside it.
• Use AI tools to prototype and explore ideas faster.
• An engineering background, or comfort working in code.
• Curious about developer tools and AI agents.
• Equally comfortable thinking through a whole user journey and sweating the interaction details.
• San Francisco Bay Area preferred

Responsibilities

• Own design for defined workflows in our developer tools, from discovery through shipped experience.
• Partner day to day with engineers and PMs to shape what gets built, and bring a point of view on scope and trade-offs.
• Scope v1s that deliver value quickly, then iterate based on usage and feedback.
• Design for the details that make technical products trustworthy: states, edge cases, errors, and permissions.
• Contribute reusable patterns and components to our design system, and help migrate product surfaces onto it.
• Use AI tools to prototype and test ideas quickly, and run lightweight usability tests when the cost of being wrong is high.
• Tie your work to outcomes such as task completion, developer activation, or fewer support tickets from confusing flows.

Skills

Product design

UX design

Visual design

Interaction design

Design systems

Developer tools

Job description

At Apollo GraphQL, we're on a mission to make it radically easier for engineering teams to ship fast, reliable products and services on top of the world's data, powering everything from web to mobile to agentic experiences.

Apollo supports some of the largest GraphQL APIs in the world. Companies like Walmart, Expedia, Peloton, DoorDash, and The New York Times are just a small sample of our customers. And what consumes an API is changing: increasingly it's an agent acting on someone's behalf, one that needs a graph it can traverse and controls over what it can reach. That's the next thing we're building, and design will decide whether it's usable.

About the role
Apollo assigns designers to our highest-leverage problems, and priorities are set quarterly. Current areas include developer onboarding, our core product interfaces, the design system, and emerging agentic products.

You'll work alongside our Head of Design, owning well-scoped problem areas end to end: understanding the users and the system behind them, shaping a v1 with engineering, and shipping polished, usable experiences. You'll bring a point of view to your work and help raise the craft bar across the team.

What you'll do

• Own design for defined workflows in our developer tools, from discovery through shipped experience.

• Partner day to day with engineers and PMs to shape what gets built, and bring a point of view on scope and trade-offs.

• Scope v1s that deliver value quickly, then iterate based on usage and feedback.

• Design for the details that make technical products trustworthy: states, edge cases, errors, and permissions.

• Contribute reusable patterns and components to our design system, and help migrate product surfaces onto it.

• Use AI tools to prototype and test ideas quickly, and run lightweight usability tests when the cost of being wrong is high.

• Tie your work to outcomes such as task completion, developer activation, or fewer support tickets from confusing flows.

Who you are

Minimum requirements

• 5+ years designing software, with a focus on product or UX design.

• A portfolio of shipped work.

• Experience designing complex products, ideally for technical users: developer tools, infrastructure, data, security, identity, or APIs.

• A track record of owning features or workflows end to end, from discovery through shipping.

• Strong visual design, interaction, and craft skills.

• Comfortable working through ambiguity within a defined problem area.

Preferred qualifications

• Have shipped developer-focused experiences, API tooling, or agent experiences.

• Experience contributing to a design system, and knowing when to work outside it.

• Use AI tools to prototype and explore ideas faster.

• An engineering background, or comfort working in code.

• Curious about developer tools and AI agents.

• Equally comfortable thinking through a whole user journey and sweating the interaction details.

• San Francisco Bay Area preferred

About Apollo

Apollo helps teams build, operate, and scale the graphs that power modern applications. If you've streamed a show, booked a trip, or read the news online, there's a good chance Apollo was working quietly behind the scenes. We support some of the largest and most sophisticated GraphQL platforms in the world.

But we're not here just to maintain the status quo. Apollo is redefining how software teams build and ship - bringing clarity, speed, and leverage to increasingly complex systems. Our platform gives teams a single, coherent way to connect clients, services, and now AI-powered experiences, without drowning in endpoints or bespoke integrations.

Just as importantly, we're building a company where ambitious people can do the best work of their careers. That means meaningful ownership, smart teammates, and tackling hard problems that actually matter. If you like moving fast, thinking deeply, and helping shape what comes next, you'll feel right at home here.