Senior Product Designer, Guardian

About the Job:

LaunchDarkly's Guardian team builds the safety layer for software delivery. Engineering teams and platform teams use Guardian to ship changes safely, catch regressions before users notice, and recover without incident. Our product surface includes Guardian Releases (progressive, policy-driven rollouts and real-time regression detection), Guardian Monitoring (post release monitoring insights and alerting), and the Software Factory, an automated delivery pipeline that takes a change from PR to production to cleanup without a human in the loop. Factory is the team's most active initiative right now.

The users you'll design for are software engineers, DevOps and platform engineers, and engineering leaders. They work in terminals, CI dashboards, pull requests, and observability systems. They trust data over interfaces and notice when software quality is low.

This role is for a designer who executes with high craft and ships with urgency. You'll work in a triad with a Product Manager and Engineering Manager, and partner directly with a Staff Designer who has been driving Guardian's UX strategy. They need a strong execution partner: someone who can take a clear direction and ship excellent work quickly, while growing into owning a product surface over time.

Responsibilities:

• Design across the Guardian product surface: Guardian Releases, Guardian Monitoring, and the Software Factory, including the PR experience, auto-flagging flows, release health views, regression detection, rollback UX, and flag cleanup.

• Work close to engineering: contribute to implementation decisions, understand technical constraints, and stay engaged through the build, not just at handoff.

• Map and clarify complex workflows to identify UX debt and opportunities for improvement across Guardian's surfaces.

• Ship production-quality work through multiple shipped states, iterate based on real usage, and maintain quality under delivery pressure.

• Contribute to the UX strategy for your product surfaces alongside your fellow Guardian designer: understand current state, define future state, and articulate the tradeoffs in each path.

• Partner with your PM and EM on scope, sequencing, and tradeoffs. Come with a point of view and advocate for strong user experiences.

• Ground design decisions in evidence: engineering constraints, customer feedback, analytics, and design partner signals from the Factory Alpha and Beta programs.

• Contribute to LaunchDarkly's design system: extend patterns for Guardian's specific interface types (monitoring views, pipeline states, health indicators) and build alignment across the UX team.

• Participate in UX critique. Give and expect direct, specific feedback.

About You:

• You care about what ships, not just what you design in Figma. You advocate for quality throughout and beyond release.

• You have a strong point of view on UI craft. You notice details that most people walk past, and you hold the line on quality when the schedule gets tight.

• Guardian's problems (autonomous releases, regression detection, agentic pipelines) do not have established UX patterns. If that kind of ambiguity is energizing, this is the right team.

• You work well in a two-designer team. You know how to split ownership, share context, and build on each other's work without stepping on it.

• You are comfortable designing for technical users who are willing to push back and communicate directly.

Qualifications:

• 6-8+ years designing complex, shipped digital products, ideally in developer tools, observability, CI/CD, incident management, or configuration-heavy B2B SaaS.

• A portfolio that shows production-quality work across multiple shipped states: not just polished concepts, but shipped interfaces you iterated on and improved over time.

• Real experience working alongside engineers: contributing to implementation and trade-off decisions, understanding what is hard to build, and staying engaged past the handoff.

• Comfort with data-dense, stateful interfaces: monitoring dashboards, pipeline views, health indicators, or any surface where users need to understand the current state of a system and take action.

• Developer user empathy: enough context to design for users whose daily tools include terminals, CI dashboards, observability systems, and pull requests.

• History of operating as a genuine partner to PM and Eng, shaping work direction rather than waiting for requirements.

• A portfolio that demonstrates production-quality execution at speed, engineering proximity, and at least one example of a data-dense or technically complex interface shipped to real users.

Specific Requirements:

• Must be authorized to work in the US or Canada (no visa sponsorship or relocation offered at this time).

• Ability to collaborate during core hours overlapping Pacific Time.

• Occasional travel (up to 10%) for team onsites, planning sessions, or customer visits.

• Portfolio required, showing production-quality execution on technically complex products.

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level P4:

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $171,200 - $235,400*
• Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago -$154,100 - $211,860**
• Zone 3: All other US locations - $145,500 - $200,090**

LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency; we are happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.

*Within the United States, our geographic pay zones are defined by counties surrounding major metropolitan areas.
**Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

About LaunchDarkly:

LaunchDarkly gives software teams control over their releases (feature flags, guarded releases, experimentation, observability, and agent management) so they can ship without putting production at risk. Our customers are engineering teams and developers who use the product directly every day.

Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gradually rolling out new application components, they escape nightmare "big-bang" technology migrations.

The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:

• Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
• Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
• Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
• Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
• Improving the effectiveness and productivity of engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability

At LaunchDarkly, we believe in the power of teams. We're building a team that is humble, open, collaborative, respectful and kind. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. LD invites any applicant to review our written Affirmative Action Plan. To do so, contact People Ops at hr@launchdarkly.com.

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