Staff Product Designer

What You Will Do

• Develop a deep understanding of Sonatype’s multi-product developer platform, personas, and core jobs to be done.
• Work closely with PMs and engineers to co-create user flows and experience direction — UX leads the thinking, but the outputs are created and iterated on together, not in isolation.
• Map complex IA, developer workflows, permissions models, and multi-product interactions into clear, intuitive experience patterns.
• Create user and product flows in Miro that reflect real constraints, technical realities, and team input.
• Shape conceptual designs and UX architectures for new features and continuous, iterative improvements — not large-scale redesigns.
• Build coded UX prototypes using Claude Code, VS Code, GitHub workflows, and front-end fundamentals (HTML/CSS/JS/React). These prototypes behave like real product experiences.
• Ensure your prototypes are structured enough that AI tools can generate engineering specs, scope definitions, and implementation requirements directly from your code diffs.
• Conduct lightweight, practical research (interviews, surveys, UAT, quick validation) when needed — and know when to proceed without research to keep momentum.
• Collaborate early and often to align constraints, scope, design direction, and technical feasibility.

What Success Looks Like

• Your prototypes aren’t just illustrative — they behave like real product experiences and provide enough structure for AI tools to generate engineering specs, scope, and implementation requirements directly from your code diffs.
• Teams ship better UX because your influence is pragmatic, collaborative, and grounded in technical realities.
• You consistently transform complex developer workflows into clear, coherent experiences.
• You make smart calls about when to research and when to ship.
• You adapt fluidly to evolving tools, processes, and AI-assisted workflows.
• You communicate clearly with engineers, PMs, and stakeholders — zooming in or out as needed.

What We Are Looking For

• Significant experience in a Product company (not just services/agency experience) with the maturity to influence across multiple product teams.
• Experience collaborating deeply with engineers; hybrid UX/engineering backgrounds are a strong plus.
• Skilled at lightweight research (interviews, surveys, usability tests, UAT).
• Able to choose the right level of research for the moment — avoiding slow, academic processes.
• You don’t need to be a full-stack engineer, but you must be comfortable building working UX prototypes:
• Strong UX judgment, especially in complex technical domains.
• Ability to simplify aggressively within real constraints.
• Collaborative, positive, and non-defensive — thrives in evolving workflows.
• Clear communicator who works well with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• AI Mindset: Curious, experimental, and excited to incorporate AI into design workflows. Comfortable using AI for structure, exploration, prototyping, and iteration.

This Role Is Not For You If . . .

• Your first instinct is to open Figma to figure out what the team should build.
• You prefer long discovery cycles, polished spec packages, or designing every state before engineering begins.
• Code-based prototyping feels uncomfortable or outside your identity as a designer.
• You want to “own UX” rather than collaborate with engineers who share UX responsibility.
• You need structured process, predictable phases, or linear design workflows.
• You feel frustrated by changing tools, evolving methods, or AI-assisted workflows.

Why Join Sonatype

• Influence UX across a multi-product developer platform used at massive scale.
• Prototype in real code environments and shape the future of design/engineering collaboration.
• Help build an AI-accelerated design workflow that’s growing and evolving quickly.
• Work with engineers who genuinely care about UX.
• Contribute to a collaborative UX Guild culture focused on quality, not ceremony.
• Solve deep, technical UX challenges — not marketing flows or surface-level UI.
• If you’re a designer who thinks in systems, builds in code, collaborates closely with engineers, and gets energy from evolving how design is done — this is the role for you.