What's the opportunity?
Were looking for a strategic and hands-on Product Design Manager to lead our Developer Experience design team. Your mission will be to reignite developer growth and win the hearts and minds of developers everywhere. You will guide the design vision and execution for our entire developer journey, from their first interaction with our documentation and SDKs to their ongoing use of our APIs, CLI, and management dashboard. This is a pivotal role focused on abstracting away the complexities of identity and creating a cohesive, intuitive, and delightful experience that empowers developers to build, test, and deploy software with speed and confidence.
You will lead and mentor a team of talented designers and champion the principle that developers are users too, applying deep user-centered thinking to reduce friction, simplify complex workflows, and lower cognitive load. Your work will shape an ecosystem of tools, APIs, and documentation that is not just functional but also embodies our Developer Experience Principles of being Simple, Clear, Quick, and Magical.
Reporting to the Vice President of Design (Auth0), this role is a core member of our Design Leadership team. You will manage a team of designers and work in deep collaboration with partners in product management and especially engineering - including our dedicated Design Engineering team based in India. This is a highly cross-functional role, as improving the developer experience is a company-wide initiative that serves as a key competitive differentiator and a primary driver of our growth. You will be instrumental in embedding a developer-first mindset into our culture and processes.
Note
: This role requires in-person onboarding and travel to our Bengaluru, IN office during the first week of employment.
Fine print:
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of product designers dedicated to creating a world-class developer experience across all key touch points, including Discovery, Integration, Outcome, and Maintenance.
- Drive the end-to-end design process, from mapping developer journeys and identifying friction points to rapid prototyping and testing of solutions for our docs, CLI, SDKs, and UIs.
- Establish and enforce a universal design language to ensure a consistent, high-quality, and predictable experience across every developer touchpoint, from our marketing site to API error messages.
- Cultivate a culture of craft and continuous improvement where "small wins" that delight developers are celebrated and UX debt is systematically addressed.
- Be a vocal advocate for developers, using qualitative insights and quantitative datalike Customer Effort Score (CES) and Critical User Journey (CUJ) metricsto champion investments in the developer experience.
- Navigate a complex and evolving technical landscape with confidence, balancing the need to fix what's broken with innovating on what's next for developers in identity.
You will:
Own
the end-to-end developer journey - make it cohesive, intuitive, and delightful while abstracting identity complexity. Set and champion
a company-wide DevEx strategy that drives developer growth and win rate; be the voice of the developer with qual/quant insights. Lead, hire, and develop
a world-class design team and culture of craft; upskill for identity/security and celebrate friction-reducing wins. Partner with Product & Engineering
to embed a developer-first mindset; prioritize UX debt and balance quick wins with long-term bets (including AI). Establish data-driven processes and design systems
(language, components, Design Engineering) to reduce friction and scale consistency across APIs, SDKs, CLI, and UI. Drive cross-functional alignment
with marketing, docs, and brand to deliver a unified experience across every touchpointfrom to error messages.
You may be a fit for this role if you:
Design Leadership and Strategy
- Have a track record of leading and mentoring a team of product designers on a mission to solve complex, systemic user experience challenges, ideally including specialized roles like design systems engineers or technical documentation designers.
- Possess 10+ years of product/UX design experience, with a significant portion focused on developer-first SaaS products, platform experiences, and solving end-to-end journey problems across multiple touch points.
- Must have 3+ years of people management and leadership experience with a track record of success in hiring, training, and developing designers ranging from junior talent to highly experienced individual contributors.
- Have successfully scaled design systems and operations, with proven experience establishing a universal design language to fix a disjointed and inconsistent user experience across multiple properties.
- Can articulate and drive a clear design strategy that prioritizes developer delight and experience over features, balances fixing what's broken with long-term vision, and is grounded in both qualitative insights and quantitative metrics
- Have a proven record of acting as a leader and influencer across product and engineering to foster a developer-first culture and embed developer experience improvements into the company's core operating model.
- Have experience managing and inspiring a distributed design team to collaborate effectively and build experiences they are proud to ship.
- Have developed and communicated a cohesive strategy to create a seamless end-to-end developer journey, recognizing that this requires breaking down organizational silos and ensuring all teams prioritize the broader user experience.
Industry Knowledge and Customer Focus
- Deeply understand the developer-focused SaaS landscape, with experience designing for APIs, SDKs, CLIs, and technical documentation. You have a passion for abstracting away the complexity of identity to create simple, intuitive developer workflows.
- Can speak fluently about the developer landscape, and articulate how a superior developer experience serves as a critical competitive differentiator. You are actively engaged with emerging trends in AI, security, and web development.
- Demonstrate a deep empathy for the developer journey, from the initial onboarding challenges to the ongoing need for clarity, productivity, and trust.
Design Management Experience
- Have experience directing design projects that tackle a fragmented user experience, successfully addressing issues like inconsistent patterns, poor navigability, and low feature discoverability.
- Have a diverse design management portfolio that shows you can create a unified vision across B2B and developer-centric use cases, driving consistency from the marketing site to the management dashboard and even API error messages.
- Have experience leading teams focused on systematically addressing UX debt and establishing frameworks like a Design Engineering function or a "Small Wins" program to create momentum and delight.
