[Hiring] Product Design Manager @CircleCI

Role Description

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. 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.

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.
• Bring the team along on AI fluency - setting clear expectations, building shared practices, and creating space for experimentation.
• Establish and optimize design processes, partnering with visual and product designers across the org to ensure efficient work and high-quality experiences.
• Lead and evolve the design system - improving components and guidelines, defining a governance model that balances quality with speed.

Qualifications

• Experience managing a team of product designers while remaining hands-on with design work.
• Strong product design fundamentals with a portfolio that shows work on complex, technical, or developer-facing products.
• Familiarity with the software development lifecycle and the ecosystem around it — CI/CD, version control, CLIs, APIs, and the workflows that connect them.
• Active, thoughtful use of AI in your own design practice.
• Proven experience building or evolving design systems.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills.

Requirements

• You genuinely enjoy both sides of the player/coach role.
• Comfort designing for power users and nuanced workflows.
• Curiosity about how developers work and experience designing for (or around) developer tools.
• Excited to bring the team along and set expectations that AI fluency is part of the job.
• Experience defining governance, contribution models, and operational rhythms that let a design team scale.

Benefits

• Base Pay Range: $167,000 — $208,750 USD.
• Reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities during the job application or interview process.

Company Description

CircleCI is the world’s largest continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, processing more than 3 million jobs a day. Companies like Hinge, HuggingFace, and Samsung use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster.