Product Design Manager

Product Design Manager Overview of Position 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. Overview of the Team 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. What You'll Do 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 What We're Looking For 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