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Role overview
As a Lead Product Designer at Couchbase, you’ll shape intuitive experiences for our flagship product, Capella, a cloud-native database-as-a-service platform. You’ll lead design initiatives from concept to execution, transforming complex workflows into simple, scalable, and effective solutions for developers and enterprises. This role combines strategic thinking, hands-on design craft, and leadership to influence product direction and elevate the overall user experience.
You’ll operate within established Capella UX direction, partnering closely with global design leadership to execute and scale high-quality design.
What you’ll do
- Lead the design of end-to-end product experiences for Couchbase, with focus on Capella, from initial concept through polished execution.
- Collaborate with product and engineering to translate complex requirements into user-centered designs.
- Clarify requirements, identify constraints, and challenge assumptions to better define the problem space.
- Explore a wide breadth of design options and articulate tradeoffs for each approach.
- Deliver crisp, pixel-perfect, and robust high-fidelity designs, including edge cases and interactive states when relevant.
- Develop interactive prototypes to explore and validate new features, workflows, and interactions.
- Own design quality, completeness, and consistency for work delivered by the Bangalore design team.
- Ensure designs are production-ready, including edge cases, states, accessibility considerations, and engineering handoff.
- Collaborate closely with designers to co-design workflows, review work in progress, and maintain a shared quality bar for Capella UX.
- Balance speed, quality, and scalability when making design tradeoffs in a complex platform product.
- Partner with engineering early to clarify intent and constraints, reducing downstream design and implementation rework.
- Conduct lightweight, high-signal user research with developers and operators, and synthesize insights into actionable design decisions even when data is incomplete.
- Exercise sound design judgment and escalate cross-team UX decisions or tradeoffs when alignment cannot be reached.
- Give constructive design feedback and mentor junior designers.
- Maintain and evolve the Capella design system in partnership with engineering, ensuring consistency, scalability, and pragmatic adoption across teams.
Mandatory qualifications
- Experience designing products for specialized audiences such as developers, SREs, and DBAs; familiarity with database software is needed.
- Experience conducting user research and applying insights to design decisions.
Qualifications
- 8+ years experience as a UX or Product Designer, with a portfolio showcasing your best work.
- Proven ability to transform complex product briefs into simple, intuitive experiences.
- Strategic thinker who considers the big picture before diving into details and knows when to zoom out and when to zoom in. Understanding of systems thinking and the ability to factor in interdependencies between features.
- Excellent communication skills to articulate design concepts and rationale.
- Comfortable working in distributed teams and collaborating across time zones.
- Proficient with Figma and AI tools
At Couchbase, we believe innovation thrives when diverse perspectives are at the table. We actively encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds—including women, people of color, LGTBQIA+ professionals, veterans, and individuals with disabilities. If you see a role that excites you, but don’t meet every qualification, we still encourage you to apply.
Studies show underrepresented talent is less likely to apply unless they meet all the criteria. We encourage you to apply if you’re excited about the role and can bring strong contributions to our team.
If you require reasonable accommodations during the recruitment process, please let your recruiter know—we’re happy to support you.
We value diverse educational and career backgrounds. If your experience aligns with the role’s goals—even if it doesn’t follow a traditional path—we’d love to hear from you.
- Generous Time Off Program - Flexibility to care for you and your family
- Wellness Benefits - A variety of world class medical plans to choose from, along with dental, vision, life insurance, and employee assistance programs*
- Financial Planning - Retirement program* and Business Travel Insurance
- Career Growth - Be valued, Create value approach
- Fun Perks - An ergonomic and comfortable in-office / WFH setup. Food & Snacks for in-office employees.
- And much more!
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What We Do
Unlike other NoSQL databases, Couchbase provides an enterprise-class, multicloud to edge database that offers the robust capabilities required for business-critical applications on a highly scalable and available platform. Couchbase is built on open standards, combining the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL, to simplify the transition from mainframe and relational databases.
