Product Design Manager, CircleCI
$167-208.8k
Continuous integration and deployment services
Open for applications
Continuous integration and deployment services
201-500 employees
Open for applications
$167-208.8k
201-500 employees
Company mission
To manage change so software teams can innovate faster, empowering technology-driven organizations to do their best work – and making engineering teams more productive and innovative.
Role
Who you are
- Experience managing a team of product designers while remaining hands-on with design work yourself - you genuinely enjoy both sides of the player/coach role
- Strong product design fundamentals with a portfolio that shows work on complex, technical, or developer-facing products; comfort designing for power users and nuanced workflows
- Familiarity with the software development lifecycle and the ecosystem around it — CI/CD, version control, CLIs, APIs, and the workflows that connect them. You don't need to be an engineer, but you should be curious about how developers work and have designed for (or around) these kinds of tools before
- Active, thoughtful use of AI in your own design practice - you've already been experimenting with tools like AI-assisted prototyping and production-ready coding, and you have a point of view on where they help and where they don't. You're excited to bring the team along and set expectations that AI fluency is part of the job
- Proven experience building or evolving design systems - not just maintaining a component library, but defining governance, contribution models, and the operational rhythms (rituals, rubrics, processes) that let a design team scale
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills - you partner effectively with Product and Engineering leaders, give direct and kind feedback, and create space for a diverse team to do their best work
What the job involves
- We're looking for a Product Design Manager to lead our UX team at CircleCI. Our company is in the middle of a significant platform evolution - rethinking core workflows, investing in design and design systems, and figuring out what it means to build a high-performing design team in the age of AI
- It's a genuinely interesting time to shape the practice here. If you're energized by the idea of shaping both the craft and the people behind a product used by over a million builds a day, while also staying close to the pixels yourself, this role will be a great fit
- This is a 50/50 player/coach role - you'll manage and grow a talented team while also rolling up your sleeves to lead design work on a few of our most important product areas
- You'll report into our head of design, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Visual Design, and Research to define what the CircleCI experience looks and feels like next
- The Product Design team at CircleCI owns the end-to-end experience developers have with our CI/CD platform - from first build to scaling across an engineering org
- The team today is a mix of Senior, Staff, and Product Designers primarily in San Francisco, and a few in Canada
- We partner deeply with Product and Engineering, use research and data to ground our decisions, and care a lot about both craft and velocity. We believe great design at a developer tools company comes from people who genuinely want to understand how engineers work, and who treat design as a team sport
- Lead and grow the team - coach them in their craft, support their career growth, run thoughtful 1:1s and design crits, and build a design culture that's collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing
- Lead design directly on strategically important product areas - shipping real work, not just reviewing it - and setting the bar for craft and quality across the team
- Develop a point of view on AI-powered design tooling - evaluating what's emerging across designing in both pixels and code, rapid prototyping, and experimentation - so that the team can make smart bets on what to adopt
- Bring the team along on AI fluency - setting clear expectations, building shared practices, and creating space for experimentation so the team is multiplying their impact with the best available tools
- Establish and optimize design processes, partnering with visual and product designers across the org to make sure we're working efficiently and shipping consistent, high-quality experiences
- Lead and evolve the design system - improving components and guidelines, defining a governance model that balances quality with speed, and establishing clear contribution and consumption patterns for both human designers and AI-assisted workflows
Our take
Engineering has seen the rise of agile, containerisation and DevOps over the last few years. As a result, the idea of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) has grown to be an important part of the engineering space. CircleCI is one company that taps into this field, offering a lightweight and open service.
There are now a lot more companies that have a culture of continuous delivery. CircleCI specifically helps automate all the steps that occur between the time developers make changes to the code and when the application gets in front of the customer. The company has a strong tailwind from this macro trend and their product is loved by engineers, putting them in a strong place to build a strong business.
Services in the sector have grown constricted and cost-heavy, but in 2022, CircleCI debuted a free tier service for engineering teams in a move away from this. By offering flexibility across an increased number of major platforms, including Docker, Windows, and MacOS, the company works towards its ultimate aim to empower technology-driven organisations.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
May 2021
$100m
SERIES F
Apr 2020
$100m
SERIES E
Total funding: $315m
Company benefits
- Remote-first company
- Home office stipend
- Unlimited PTO
- Generous parental leave
- Health benefits that can cover employees and dependents up to 100%
- Quarterly wellness days, a free Calm subscription, wellness reimbursement, and Cleo for new parents
- Opportunities to learn new skills, including project-based learning and presentations from our colleagues
- Udemy for on-demand learning, and an annual stipend for personal development outside of CircleCI
Company HQ
The East Cut, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jim Rose
(CEO)Joined CircleCI as COO. Serial entrepreneur, founding Distiller (acquired by CircleCI) and Copious.
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