Staff Product Designer, APM

We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer to join the APM (Application Performance Monitoring) team. This team is focused on helping engineers instrument, investigate, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance across complex distributed systems. You’ll work closely with PMs and engineers to design intuitive experiences for navigating technical workflows, understanding system behavior, identifying anomalies, and accelerating debugging and observability workflows. Your work will help developers better understand how their systems behave in production and enable faster resolution of performance and reliability issues.

You’ll take end-to-end ownership of your design work while also shaping broader product direction, influencing cross-functional strategy, and helping other designers communicate ideas and build support for their decisions across the company.

At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.

What You’ll Do:

• Become a design leader within APM by proactively identifying opportunities and shaping the design strategy across multiple product areas and workflows.

• Partner closely with PMs and engineers to design intuitive experiences for highly technical systems, balancing user needs with platform scalability and engineering constraints.
• Drive end-to-end product thinking across onboarding, instrumentation, troubleshooting, debugging, runtime analysis, and performance investigation workflows.
• Navigate ambiguity and help define product direction through research, systems thinking, prototyping, and iterative execution.
• Use AI-assisted workflows and prototyping tools to rapidly explore ideas, validate concepts, and accelerate iteration throughout the design process.
• Collaborate closely with engineering teams through implementation, prototyping interactions in code when appropriate and refining product quality directly in production-like environments.
• Bridge the gap between technical requirements and user needs, advocating for customers while influencing strategic product decisions.
• Conduct and synthesize qualitative and quantitative research to identify pain points, validate solutions, and guide roadmap decisions.
• Communicate design rationale clearly and persuasively across design, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Mentor and support other designers by providing feedback, sharing frameworks and workflows, and helping r