Principal Product Designer

Principal Product Designer – Infrastructure 

Your opportunity

As a Principal Product Designer on New Relic's Infrastructure design team, you'll set the design vision for how engineers understand and operate the systems underneath their applications — cloud environments, Kubernetes, hosts, network performance (including eBPF-based instrumentation), and databases, partnering directly with VP- and SVP-level engineering and product leadership to shape a roadmap with measurable business impact. You'll work across the US and India to turn dense infrastructure telemetry into interfaces that hold up when something is actually on fire.

We care more about how you think than what you've already shipped. This role is built for someone with genuine, demonstrated curiosity about how complex technical systems work — someone who has a track record of digging into unfamiliar domains, asking good questions of engineers, and building real fluency rather than treating the underlying technology as a black box. Direct observability experience is a plus, not a prerequisite. The expectation for this role is  someone who generates the ideas required to solve a problem even when it's ambiguous, and who leads through that complexity rather than waiting for someone else to define it.

You'll set craft and design-system standards across the Infrastructure design team, mentor senior and mid-level designers beyond a single direct pod, and be a visible design leader recognized by teams inside and outside the department as we evolve how we use AI in our own design workflow. This is a remote role based in India, working in close daily overlap with a US-based team.

What you'll do

• Infrastructure & complex data visualization: Design dashboards and visualizations that make cloud, Kubernetes, host, network, and database telemetry legible — reducing cognitive load for engineers troubleshooting under pressure.
• System coherence & fail-safe UX: Champion coherence across the Infrastructure surface, designing interaction patterns that guide platform engineers and SREs safely through incident response and root-cause investigation.
• Own the product vision: Lead the creation of new product vision for Infrastructure with a clear line to business revenue impact, serving as the primary design point of contact across product, engineering, and go-to-market.
• Go deep on the technology: Build real fluency in the systems you're designing for — cloud architecture, container orchestration, network protocols, eBPF, database internals — through direct conversations with engineers, hands-on exploration, and a genuine appetite for the technical detail most designers skip.
• User research: Plan and run interviews and usability testing with SREs, platform engineers, and DevOps practitioners to validate design direction and keep the roadmap grounded in how these users actually work.
• AI-forward evolution: Partner with engineering and product to bring AI-assisted diagnostics and anomaly detection into the infrastructure experience, applying the same curiosity to new AI tooling that you bring to the underlying systems.
• Team leadership & craft: Set the craft bar across Infrastructure design, mentor senior and mid-level designers, and represent the team's design perspective directly to VP and SVP stakeholders.
• Design at scale: Drive large-scale, cross-team design initiatives within Infrastructure, and partner with principal designers across Product Platform and Growth & Monetization to keep the broader platform coherent as it expands.

This role requires

• 12+ years of professional experience in product or UX design, with a portfolio showing complex, data-heavy B2B SaaS or enterprise work.
• Demonstrated, innate curiosity about technology — evidence that you've taught yourself unfamiliar technical domains in past roles, not just applied design process to whatever was handed to you.
• Experience designing for technical personas (software engineers, SREs, DevOps, platform engineers), or a clear, credible path to ramping into this audience quickly.
• Real skill in user research: interviews, usability testing, and synthesis that changes product direction, not just validates it.
• Advanced proficiency in Figma and experience building or contributing to component-based design systems at scale, including a demonstrated ability to design systems-level solutions rather than instance by instance.
• Solid grasp of WCAG 2.1 AA and assistive technologies, with the ability to independently troubleshoot accessibility issues and mentor others on accessible design practices.
• Ability to connect design work to business outcomes — mapping initiatives to KPIs/OKRs and making the case for design decisions in terms product and engineering partners respect, including a track record of tying design work to measurable revenue impact, not just usability metrics.
• Strong written and verbal English, and comfort working with a distributed team across US and India time zones.
• A track record operating independently across multiple teams in a complex environment, with real experience partnering directly with VP- or SVP-level stakeholders on strategic initiatives.
• An external professional presence in the design community — conferences, writing, mentorship beyond New Relic — consistent with the seniority of this level.

Bonus points if you have

• Direct experience in observability, infrastructure monitoring, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI), or adjacent developer-facing tooling.
• Prior exposure to designing for AI-assisted or LLM-based tools, and comfort prototyping with AI-native tools (Figma AI, Cursor, Claude Code, etc.).
• A working understanding of frontend fundamentals (HTML, CSS, React) that makes engineering handoff smoother.
• Strong facilitation skills for cross-functional design sprints and workshops.

BUSINESS GOALS

This hire addresses cognitive overload during infrastructure incident response — the gap between a high-level "something's wrong" signal and the granular cloud, cluster, host, network, or database trace that explains why. As New Relic's Infrastructure suite absorbs more surface area (AI-agent observability, expanding eBPF coverage, deeper database monitoring), we need a design leader who can set a portfolio-level vision for that complexity — one with a credible line to business revenue and adoption, not just a well-designed feature. The end goal is the same one driving the whole design org right now: bringing AI into the diagnostic workflow to cut customer mean-time-to-resolution.

What are the key milestones or business outcomes this person must deliver in Year 1 to be considered a successful hire?

1. Unify infrastructure workflows: audit and connect monitoring and mitigation pathways across cloud, Kubernetes, host, network, and database surfaces, establishing a portfolio-level design vision with measurable adoption and revenue impact, not just shared visual patterns.
2. AI-assisted diagnostics: deliver initial UX architecture and human-in-the-loop interaction models for AI-assisted anomaly detection and root-cause analysis in Infrastructure.
3. Process maturation: help standardize cross-functional design review between design, product, and engineering on complex telemetry pipelines (OpenTelemetry, eBPF-based instrumentation).
4. Research cadence: stand up a continuous research loop with SREs and platform engineers to keep the roadmap grounded in real operating conditions, not assumptions.
5. Executive partnership: build a working relationship with VP/SVP engineering and product leadership, and with peer principal designers across Product Platform and Growth & Monetization, so Infrastructure's design vision holds together with the rest of the platform.