Product Designer

Base Requirements For All Roles

• Ability to use GitLab.
• Several years professional experience designing for complex products
• Demonstration of design craft through visual and interaction skills, attention to detail, and commitment to creating high-quality work
• Strategic thinking motivated by data, research, and business impact
• Familiarity with accessibility best practices and WCAG guidelines
• Comfort working in highly agile, iterative product development process
• Design systems knowledge, understanding, and practice
• Understanding of AI capabilties and constraints sufficient to evaluate when AI is appropriate for solving user problems
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values
• Strong bias for action and ability to develop daily priorities to achieve goals (manager of one).
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
• Working knowledge of HTML/CSS, and familiarity with JavaScript.
• General knowledge of Git (for example, branching, push/pulling, committing, squashing) and DevOps (for example, pipelines, deployments, security) flows.

Levels

Product Designer

A Product Designer is assigned to a group, with exceptions made based on business needs.

Job Level

The Product Designer is outlined in the Job Levels resource.

Responsibilities

• Research and validation: Conduct research to understand and validate user needs, identifying where current experiences fall short and bringing validated insights to planning discussions.
• Evidence-based contribution: Contribute evidence-based perspective to product discussions that helps inform better decisions, articulating connections between design decisions and user success.
• Domain awareness: Demonstrate working knowledge of your group’s capabilities, how users actually use them, and recognize when user problems might benefit from AI capabilities.
• Tactical execution: Create tactical deliverables (user flows, designs, prototypes) that solve validated user problems and are connected to user needs and business outcomes.
• Communication: Communicate UX activities and findings with clear language that simplifies complexity, framing research findings as strategic intelligence.
• Usability identification: Identify usability issues in your group and make recommendations for addressing friction based on user impact.
• Iteration practice: Practice design iteration, break down designs to fit release cadence, review merge requests, and provide thoughtful feedback on implementation choices.
• Cross-boundary awareness: Notice gaps between features or systems that create friction for end-to-end user journeys and surface cross-group dependencies.
• Design system contribution: Actively contribute additions or enhancements to Pajamas Design System based on your work.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with Technical Writers on microcopy and documentation, participate in design reviews, and help ensure terminology is consistent and user-centered.

Requirements

A Product Designer is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities with a commitment to results and building strategic thinking skills.

Senior Product Designer

A Senior Product Designer is assigned to a group, with exceptions made based on business needs.

Senior Job Level

The Senior Product Designer is outlined in the Job Levels resource.

Senior Responsibilities

• Strategic influence: Shape roadmap priorities by bringing validated user needs and compelling evidence to planning discussions, operating upstream before direction is set.
• Research and validation: Conduct comprehensive research that identifies strategic opportunities and connects findings to business outcomes, influencing what gets prioritized.
• Experience vision: Lead with vision for your area that shows what the experience should be, creating strategic outputs like journey maps, storyboards, and design visions.
• Quality advocacy: Advocate for quality with data by establishing clear success criteria and using evidence to drive decisions, simplifying aggressively and challenging assumptions before features are built.
• Domain expertise: Maintain deep knowledge of your group’s capabilities and competitive landscape, evaluating when AI is the right solution versus traditional approaches.
• Craft excellence: Set quality standards for your area through strong visual and interaction design, providing constructive feedback that improves others’ work.
• Cross-boundary thinking: Identify cross-boundary gaps and drive collaboration across teams to promote end-to-end user experience, working with platform-wide perspective.
• Design system contribution: Contribute additions and enhancements to Pajamas Design System, helping determine use cases and providing recommendations for patterns.
• Collaboration: Work effectively with the centralized AI design team when appropriate, with technical writers on terminology and documentation, and guide others in adopting effective iteration practices.
• Mentoring and recruiting: Provide guidance to other designers, share knowledge to help others develop skills, and participate in hiring by interviewing candidates and evaluating their portfolios.

Senior Requirements

A Senior Product Designer is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while demonstrating strategic thinking and commitment to deliver results.

Staff Product Designer

A Staff Product Designer is assigned to a group, with exceptions made based on business needs.

Staff Job Level

The Staff Product Designer is outlined in the Job Levels resource.

Staff Responsibilities

• Product strategy: Drive product strategy in your area by defining problems worth solving, validating opportunities, and exercising strategic judgment about when AI is appropriate for initiatives.
• Business impact: Quantify business impact of design decisions, connecting experience to business outcomes and leading strategic initiatives that span multiple releases.
• Strategic positioning: Operate upstream at the source where product direction gets set, positioned to say “no” or “not like this” before engineering starts based on professional judgment.
• Vision and direction: Collaborate with your group on user-centric vision and long-term roadmap, shaping direction with focus on long-term execution while driving experimentation and vision work.
• Domain depth: Maintain deep knowledge of your group’s capabilities and end-to-end product, bridging domain expertise with AI capabilities to help the AI design team understand context.
• Craft mastery: Demonstrate mastery in design execution, set quality standards, provide constructive critiques that elevate others’ work, and delegate tactical execution while maintaining standards.
• Platform-wide thinking: Think platform-wide beyond individual features, identify systemic gaps spanning multiple teams, act as connective tissue, and drive solutions to cross-boundary problems.
• Team enablement: Coach team members to operate as strategic partners, advocate for effective iteration practices across the company, mentor UX department members, and build trust with other disciplines.
• Design system leadership: Contribute strategic direction and patterns to Pajamas Design System, identifying systemic needs that should become platform capabilities.

Staff Requirements

A Staff Product Designer is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while coaching team members to operate as strategic partners and work iteratively.

Principal Product Designer

A Principal Product Designer is assigned to projects, based on their skills and business needs. This flexibility enables us to create broader impact and handle the most complex problems.

Principal Job Level

The Principal Product Designer is outlined in the Job Levels resource.

Principal Responsibilities

• Company-level strategy: Shape product strategy at the company level through validated insights, connecting design opportunities to business outcomes and compelling vision.
• Complexity reduction: Reduce scope, complexity, and ambiguity of the most challenging initiatives to enable organizational action, shaping when and how AI should be deployed across company-level initiatives.
• Vision leadership: Influence vision and roadmap of projects to ensure they’re user-centered and connected to company goals, anticipating market shifts and translating foresight into strategic initiatives.
• Platform-wide impact: Think platform-wide across the entire product, act as connective tissue at company level, drive collaboration to influence product strategy at highest levels, and own solutions to most complex cross-boundary challenges.
• Executive communication: Represent design perspective in executive-level discussions, show strong point of view backed by evidence, unblock conversations across teams, and collaborate early when ideas are rough.
• Craft and quality frameworks: Drive design proficiency across teams through innovation and strategic vision, model application of design criteria, and create frameworks that embed design quality throughout organization.
• Research and validation: Lead research that challenges conventional thinking and opens new strategic opportunities, help connect research efforts across teams, and validate opportunities that could transform product direction.
• Skills development: Identify growth opportunities for designers, provide targeted mentorship to build craft and leadership capabilities, creating learning pathways that connect skill-building to career progression, and advocate for development resources with leadership.
• Industry presence: Be an active voice in the UX industry sharing learnings, and represent GitLab’s values and mission in the design industry.
• Goal setting: Help set achievable measurable impactful goals that drive results, and identify and address cultural and organizational needs.

Principal Requirements

A Principal Product Designer is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while fostering a culture of strategic ownership and personal performance.

Distinguished Product Designer

A Distinguished Product Designer operates at the highest level of individual contribution, serving as a strategic design leader who shapes GitLab’s product direction and represents design excellence both internally and externally.

Distinguished Job Level

The Distinguished Product Designer is outlined in the Job Levels resource.

Distinguished Responsibilities

• Executive partnership: Partner with executives and senior leadership to shape product strategy, ensuring user-centered design is foundational to company direction.
• Company-level vision: Lead design on the most complex, strategically important initiatives spanning multiple stages or product areas, creating compelling Northstar narratives that shape GitLab’s future direction.
• Strategic insights: Champion evidence-based design across the organization, synthesizing research across domains to inform company-wide decisions and partnering with Experience Research leadership on research strategy.
• Design excellence: Set and evolve the quality bar for design across GitLab, establishing frameworks and principles that guide design decisions organization-wide and drive innovation in design practice.
• Executive communication: Develop vision materials for distinct audiences (customer validation, executive alignment, Board review), representing GitLab’s design perspective in executive discussions that influence company direction.
• Cross-functional leadership: Build strong partnerships with leaders across Product, Engineering, and Brand, navigating complex organizational dynamics to drive alignment on experience-critical initiatives.
• Industry leadership: Represent GitLab in the design industry through keynotes and publications, shaping industry conversations and building GitLab’s reputation as a destination for world-class design talent.
• Organizational development: Partner with design leadership on organizational strategy and team structure, mentor Principal and Staff designers, cultivate healthy design culture.
• Platform and systems: Provide strategic direction for Pajamas Design System evolution and identify systemic experience patterns that should become platform capabilities.
• Strategic goal setting: Partners with leadership to define experience-level goals that drive company results, ensuring design initiatives are measurable and connected to business outcomes.

Distinguished Requirements

A Distinguished Product Designer is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while driving a culture of accountability across the organization and coaching others to achieve ambitious goals.

Performance indicators

Success is measured by customer outcomes, not output volume:

• Business impact metrics connecting design decisions to user success and business results
• Stratetic influence through valudated needs that shaped prioritization decisions
• Perception of usability (SUS)
• Product Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
• Pajamas component migrations

Relevant links

• Upstream Studios
• Product Design
• GitLab Design Project
• GitLab Design System

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below, although it can change depending on calendar availability. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who is conducting your interview, you can find their job title on our team page.

Screening Call

Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30-minute screening call with a member of our hiring team. In this call, we will discuss your experience, understand what you are looking for in a product design role, talk about your work and approach to product design, discuss your compensation expectations and reasons why you want to join GitLab, and answer any questions you have.

Interview Process

The interview panel will vary based on the role level and reporting structure:

For roles reporting to a Product Design Manager or Senior Product Design Manager

Interview with a Product Designer (1 hour): This interview focuses on your design experience, process, and approach. You’ll be asked situational questions about how you’ve handled specific scenarios in your work. You should be prepared to discuss your design and research process, how you collaborate with others, and how you approach your role. You’ll also walk through a case study from your portfolio for approximately 30 minutes. We’ll want to understand your process, the size and structure of your team, the project goals, your low and high-fidelity design work, how you approached and synthesized research, what design standards you worked within, and how you collaborated. Choose a project that demonstrates how you solved a problem, ideally with similar challenges or context to the stage group you’re interviewing for. Be prepared to discuss your project throughout the walkthrough. You’ll have time at the end to ask questions.

Interview with the Hiring Product Design Manager (1 hour): This interview follows a similar format to the peer interview, with situational questions and discussion of your design process, collaboration style, and approach to your work. You may present the same case study or a different one. You’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions about the role and team.

Interview with a Director of Product Design or Senior Director of Product Design (50 minutes): This interview assesses your research, strategy, and design skills. The interviewer will want to understand how you’ve incorporated research into your work and your grasp of UX research fundamentals and methodology. Be prepared to discuss the soft skills product designers need and how you apply them in practice.

Interview with a Product Manager and Engineering Manager (1 hour): This interview focuses on your ability to collaborate with product and engineering teams and evaluates how well your skills align with the needs of a specific stage group.

For Staff, Principal, and Distinguished roles reporting to the Senior Director of Product Design

Interview with a Staff+ Product Designer (1 hour): This interview focuses on your design expertise, strategic thinking, and ability to work at a senior level. You should be prepared to discuss your case study and demonstrate how you approach complex design challenges. The interviewer will be evaluating your ability to drive design direction, mentor others, and balance user needs with business goals and technical constraints.

Interview with the Hiring Manager (1 hour): This interview assesses your strategic design thinking, leadership capabilities, and alignment with team goals. The conversation will focus on how you drive design point of view, interact with peers and stakeholders, handle challenges, and what you’ve learned from your work.

Interview with Product Management and Engineering Leadership (1 hour): This interview evaluates your ability to partner with and influence senior product and engineering leaders across the organization.

Interview with the Chief Design Officer (50 minutes): This conversation focuses on your vision for design, strategic thinking at the organizational level, and how you can contribute to GitLab’s design excellence.

Offer

Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer through a video call or phone call.

Preparing for your interviews

Case studies

Here are some helpful tips for when you are sharing a case study:

• A formal presentation is not required but it is helpful to bring your materials together. We recommend not sharing entire design files as it can be difficult for an interviewer to follow along.
• Clearly outlined user and business problems that you were solving and how you learned about them.
• What your role was (for example, who did you work with and what was your responsibility).
• The details of the design process (polished visuals are fine but you may want to include the sketches, wireframes, prototypes, or the ideas that didn’t make it).
• The result of your work (learnings, successfully achieved goals, impact on key metrics).

Internal candidates

The hiring process for internal candidates may be slightly adjusted from the above, but in general the goal is still to evaluate the best fit for the role. Interview questions may be adapted to gauge interest and skills in specific areas the team would like to grow, or about specific team responsibilities. A case study review is not necessary; instead, consider current or previous work assignments and experience in light of the position.

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

 

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About GitLab

GitLab is an open core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating the rate of human progress. This mission is integral to our culture, influencing how we hire, build products, and lead our industry. We make this possible at GitLab by running our operations on our product and staying aligned with our values. Learn more about Life at GitLab. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise, and Duo Workflow, customers get the benefit of AI at every stage of the SDLC. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier. All team members are encouraged and expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact across our global organisation.

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