Staff Product Designer, APM

Datadog; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

New hire stock equity (RSUs)

Professional development opportunities

Inclusive company culture

Job summary

Datadog is looking for a Staff Product Designer to join their APM (Application Performance Monitoring) team in New York. You will lead design efforts for intuitive experiences, ensuring engineers can effectively manage application performance. This role emphasizes collaboration with PMs and engineers to define product strategy and design workflows.

Applicants should have over 10 years of experience in digital product design, focusing on complex technical systems, with a strong portfolio demonstrating impactful design solutions.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in digital product design.
• Strong portfolio showcasing technical products and systems-oriented workflows.
• Experience designing for developer platforms or observability tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead design strategy across multiple product areas.
• Collaborate with PMs and engineers to create intuitive user experiences.
• Drive product thinking for troubleshooting and performance investigations.

Skills

Digital product design

Systems thinking

User-centered design

Collaborative communication

Tools

AI-assisted design tools

Prototyping tools

Job description

Staff Product Designer – Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer to join the APM (Application Performance Monitoring) team. This team is focused on helping engineers instrument, investigate, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance across complex distributed systems. You’ll work closely with PMs and engineers to design intuitive experiences for navigating technical workflows, understanding system behavior, identifying anomalies, and accelerating debugging and observability workflows. Your work will help developers better understand how their systems behave in production and enable faster resolution of performance and reliability issues.

You’ll take end‑to‑end ownership of your design work while also shaping broader product direction, influencing cross‑functional strategy, and helping other designers communicate ideas and build support for their decisions across the company.

At Datadog, we value office culture, relationships, collaboration, and creativity. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our staff can create a work‑life harmony that best fits them.

What You’ll Do:

• Become a design leader within APM by proactively identifying opportunities and shaping the design strategy across multiple product areas and workflows.
• Partner closely with PMs and engineers to design intuitive experiences for highly technical systems, balancing user needs with platform scalability and engineering constraints.
• Drive end‑to‑end product thinking across onboarding, instrumentation, troubleshooting, debugging, runtime analysis, and performance investigation workflows.
• Navigate ambiguity and help define product direction through research, systems thinking, prototyping, and iterative execution.
• Use AI‑assisted workflows and prototyping tools to rapidly explore ideas, validate concepts, and accelerate iteration throughout the design process.
• Collaborate closely with engineering teams through implementation, prototyping interactions in code when appropriate, and refining product quality directly in production‑like environments.
• Bridge the gap between technical requirements and user needs, advocating for customers while influencing strategic product decisions.
• Conduct and synthesize qualitative and quantitative research to identify pain points, validate solutions, and guide roadmap decisions.
• Communicate design rationale clearly and persuasively across design, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Mentor and support other designers by providing feedback, sharing frameworks and workflows, and helping raise the overall quality bar across the organization.
• Contribute to the evolution of modern AI‑enabled design workflows, helping teams rethink how products are explored, prototyped, and shipped.

Who You Are:

• You have 10+ years of experience in digital product design.
• Your portfolio demonstrates a strong track record of designing and shipping complex technical products and systems‑oriented workflows.
• You have experience designing for developer platforms, observability tools, infrastructure products, or other highly technical domains.
• You are comfortable operating in ambiguous environments and influencing product direction through strong systems thinking and product judgment.
• You have demonstrated experience conducting research, synthesizing insights, and influencing product strategy across cross‑functional teams.
• You have a track record of telling compelling stories that build alignment, influence stakeholders, and articulate a clear product and design vision.
• You are deeply thoughtful about edge cases, scalability, information architecture, and designing for technical depth without sacrificing usability.
• You proactively lead initiatives from concept to execution, balancing priorities and navigating complex stakeholder environments.
• You thrive in cross‑functional collaboration and are comfortable working closely with engineers throughout implementation.
• You are fluent in modern design and prototyping tools, and you actively explore AI‑assisted workflows to improve iteration speed, prototyping, implementation collaboration, and product quality.
• You are interested in evolving how design teams work through code‑aware tooling, AI‑assisted prototyping, and emerging design‑engineering workflows.
• You give and receive feedback well, and proactively mentor other designers to elevate the quality of the broader team.

Benefits and Growth:

• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
• Intradepartmental mentor and buddy program for in‑house networking
• An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (employee resource groups)
• Access to Inclusion Talks, internal panel discussions
• Free, global mental health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+
• Competitive global benefits

The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is: $210,000 – $280,000 USD.

Equal Opportunity at Datadog:

Datadog is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and other characteristics protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.

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Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice. For information on our AI policy, please visit Interviewing at Datadog AI Guidelines.