Senior Product Designer

About Kestrel Labs

Kestrel Labs makes observability tooling for teams who run distributed systems and are tired of dashboards that only make sense to the person who built them. We are around 130 people, remote-first since day one, and our product is used by roughly 900 engineering organisations to trace requests across services that nobody fully holds in their head anymore.

Design at Kestrel is a small group of five embedded across product squads. There is no separate design department that hands off specs; you sit with the engineers building the thing.

What you'll do

• Own the design of our trace exploration surface end to end, from early problem framing through to shipped interface and post-release measurement.
• Work through dense information design problems: waterfall views, service maps, high-cardinality filtering, and the perpetual question of what to show when there are forty thousand spans.
• Run lightweight research directly with engineers who use Kestrel daily, including recorded sessions, diary studies during incident weeks, and quick concept tests.
• Extend and maintain our design system in Figma alongside a front-end engineer who owns the component library in code.
• Pair with engineers during implementation so the shipped result matches the intent, and adjust the design when the constraints turn out to be real.
• Present work in our weekly open design review, where anyone in the company can turn up and argue with you.

What we're looking for

• Five or more years designing software products, with at least two of those on tools aimed at a technical audience.
• A portfolio that shows your reasoning, not just the final screens. We want to see the version that did not work and why you changed course.
• Fluency in Figma, including components, variables and auto layout used well enough that other people can pick up your files.
• Comfort with quantitative signals: reading product analytics, forming a hypothesis, and knowing when the numbers cannot answer the question.
• Strong written communication. Most decisions here are made in documents and comment threads rather than meetings.
• Working hours with at least four hours of overlap with Central European Time.

Nice to have

• Experience designing for monitoring, security, infrastructure or developer tooling.
• Some front-end literacy, even if you have not written production code in years.
• A track record of improving a design system that other designers actually adopted.

Benefits

• Private health insurance with dental and mental health cover included.
• A yearly EUR 1,800 home office budget, renewable every three years for hardware.
• A learning budget of EUR 2,000 per year for conferences, courses and books, with time set aside to use it.
• Stock options with a ten-year exercise window.