Principal Product Designer

Description

We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us!

Your opportunity

As a Principal Product Designer on the UX Platform team, you will be the most senior individual design voice across the breadth of the UX Platform: the products our engineers and customers rely on every day, and the Design System that ties them together. You will partner closely with our Design Director as a trusted right hand, owning the hardest and most ambiguous problems, setting the quality bar, and helping decisions move so design is never the bottleneck.

Two things sit at the center of this role: designing for AI-native experiences, and rethinking how design itself gets done in AI-first workflows. We are fully immersed in both, and this role has a real hand in shaping where they go. We want someone genuinely eager to learn, test, and experiment here, but with the judgment to tell where AI raises the quality of the work and where it just adds noise. The aim is to use AI where it genuinely makes the work better, not to adopt it for its own sake.

You are a pragmatic optimist: ambitious about where we could go, honest about the terrain in front of us. You can hold “this is hard and might not work” and “let’s do it anyway, here’s how” in the same breath. You lead through craft and influence rather than authority, you take a vague problem and give it shape, you bring strong opinions but invite better ones, and you raise risks early and honestly. You lift the people around you by example, and the whole team’s work gets sharper because you are on it.

Responsibilities

• Own the most complex and ambiguous design problems across our platform scope, from framing through detailed craft, end to end and with no oversight required.
• Design for AI-native experiences: shape interfaces that are non-deterministic and adapt to each use, design for outputs we cannot fully predict, and set the design principles and heuristics that keep those experiences coherent.
• Evolve how we design in AI-first, spec-driven workflows: help define how our role shifts, act as a multiplier for the team, and build ways to evaluate that we are shipping higher quality software, not just more of it.
• Set the bar for documentation and traceability: clear specs, references, and rationale that the team, our partners, and our AI tools can build on.
• Act as a second senior point of design judgment and a subject matter expert on our product: deputize for the Design Director in Product and Engineering reviews, shape strategic direction, and hold the quality bar across the whole product, not only your own area.
• Strengthen the connection between product design and the Design System, and define systems and processes that others across the company can benefit from.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to align on direction and keep work moving at a healthy cadence.
• Mentor designers, lead by example, and raise the overall level of craft across the team.
• This role requires
• Extensive product design experience, including senior or lead work on complex software products.
• A portfolio that shows depth of craft and systems thinking across both product design and design systems, and recognized mastery of craft: a track record of raising the collective quality bar and defining patterns, systems, or processes that others adopt.
• A track record of owning ambiguous problems independently and driving them to real outcomes, end to end and without oversight.
• Comfort designing for AI-native, non-deterministic experiences, and enthusiasm for evolving how design gets done in AI-first workflows.
• A discerning approach to AI: eager to experiment, but with the judgment to tell where it adds real value, and a quality bar that does not bend for the sake of hype.
• Ability to act as a subject matter expert who shapes priorities, leads research where useful, and interprets analysis into design decisions.
• Proven ability to influence Product and Engineering partners without formal authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, and a habit of documenting decisions, rationale, and references clearly so that people and tools can build on them.
• Bonus points if you have
• Experience designing services and platforms, especially in observability, developer tools, data, or complex B2B products.
• A technical background: an understanding of modern software architecture, and experience with data visualization.
• Experience contributing to or stewarding a design system at scale.
• Hands-on experience with spec-driven or AI-assisted design workflows.
• Comfort working in a distributed, cross-cultural team.
• Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.
• Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics’ different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us – including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We’re looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes.
• We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.