Staff Product Designer, APM

About the role

We're looking for a Staff Product Designer to join the APM (Application Performance Monitoring) team. This team focuses on helping engineers instrument, investigate, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance across complex distributed systems. You'll work closely with Product Managers 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.

Responsibilities

• Become a design leader within APM by proactively identifying opportunities and shaping the design strategy across multiple product areas and workflows.
• Partner closely with Product Managers 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Who You Are

At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.