Lead Product Designer

About this role

About The Team

The Product Design team at CircleCI is responsible for taking the complexities of CI/CD into understandable, trustworthy, and efficient experiences for developers and platform teams that rely on CircleCI for their pipelines. Our job is to understand the developers’ and agentic workflows of configuring, troubleshooting and managing pipelines at scale. We influence the design and product decisions at CircleCI so we can support our customers striving to shorten the distance between idea and delivery.

About The Role

Lead Product Designers at CircleCI turn business context into design strategy that engineers and product managers can rally around, and strategy into products that help thousands of developers deliver better software, faster.

They’ll be building deep expertise in the developer tooling field while balancing shifting priorities in a highly technical domain. They’ll be hands-on in shipping the highest impact solutions for hard, real-world problems while coaching designers on maintaining a high bar for craft without slowing delivery.

• This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, requiring 2 days per week in office

What You’ll Do

• Driving measurable business impact through large, wide-ranging projects.
• Leading user journey mapping across complex product experiences.
• Leading competitive analysis and synthesizing insights to inform product direction.
• Shipping small, quick experiments with engineers to validate ideas and drive business outcomes.
• Reviewing team designs and setting quality standards before designs are delivered.

What You’ll Bring

• 8+ years of product design experience, with at least 5 years designing B2B SaaS products.
• Shipped work in developer tools, DevOps, infrastructure, or another product used primarily by software engineers.
• Hands-on experience with, and strong working knowledge of, AI code-generation tooling, with an understanding of the technical complexity and tradeoffs of proposed solutions.
• Track record of partnering with engineering and product leaders on roadmap and scope for a product with live production users.
• A portfolio showing sophisticated, creative UX solutions to complex technical problems and a proven grasp of information architecture.

Bonus Skills (Nice To Have)

• Experience designing for developer tools, or for a similarly complex technical space (e.g., infrastructure, security, data, or observability).
• Hands-on use of a CI/CD platform (such as CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins) as a user or admin.
• Experience designing AI-assisted or automation features for developer workflows.

United States Base Pay Range

$147,500—$183,500 USD

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

About CircleCI

CircleCI is the world’s largest continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the hub where code moves from idea to delivery. As one of the most-used DevOps tools - processing more than 3 million jobs a day - CircleCI has unique access to data on how the most effective engineering teams work, and the tools to help software companies successfully leverage the power of AI into their commercial applications. Companies like Hinge, HuggingFace, and Samsung use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco with a global, remote workforce, CircleCI is venture-backed by Base10, Greenspring Associates, Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold

Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital, Next Equity Partners, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal Capital.

CircleCI is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

How CircleCI Uses AI In Hiring

At CircleCI, people make our hiring decisions. We use technology to support our recruiting team so they can spend more time on what matters most: getting to know you.

Where we may use AI

• Job descriptions and messaging: AI may help draft job descriptions and role-specific messaging so they are clear and accurate.
• Application review: For some roles, we use an AI tool to review applications, including resumes and application responses, against criteria our hiring team sets for the role. The tool generates a fit score and summary to help recruiters organize and prioritize applications.
• Interview notes: With advance notice, an AI note-taking tool may join interviews to record, transcribe, and summarize the conversation. This lets interviewers focus on talking with you. You will be told before each interview, and you may opt out at any stage by letting your recruiter know. If you opt out, the tool will not join, and your candidacy is not affected.
• Outreach: AI may help draft candidate outreach and scheduling messages, which our team reviews before sending.

Our commitment

AI does not make hiring decisions at CircleCI. Our recruiters and hiring teams review candidates and make every decision to advance or reject an application. No candidate is rejected based solely on an AI score. We have tools and processes in place to test for bias and to review how these tools perform, and we adjust our approach as AI technology and the laws that govern it change.

Your choices

You can ask for human-only review of your application, opt out of AI interview note-taking, request an accommodation, or ask questions about how we use AI. Contact [email removed]. For how we handle your data, including retention, see our Privacy Policy.