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As a Lead Product Designer, you'll lead design initiatives for Couchbase's Capella platform, transforming complex workflows into user-friendly solutions while collaborating with teams to define and execute design strategies.
As industries race to embrace AI, traditional database solutions fall short of rising demands for versatility, performance, and affordability. Couchbase is leading the way with Capella, the developer data platform for critical applications in our AI world. By uniting transactional, analytical, mobile, and AI workloads into a seamless, fully managed solution, Couchbase empowers developers and enterprises to build and scale applications with unmatched flexibility, performance, and cost-efficiency—from cloud to edge. Trusted by over 30% of the Fortune 100, Couchbase is unlocking innovation, accelerating AI transformation, and redefining customer experiences. Come join our mission.
Senior/Lead Product Designer
Role overview
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.
Why Couchbase?
Modern customer experiences need a flexible cloud database platform that can power applications spanning from cloud to edge and everything in between. Couchbase’s mission is to simplify how developers and architects develop, deploy and consume modern applications wherever they are. We have reimagined the database with our fast, flexible and affordable cloud database platform Capella, allowing organizations to quickly build applications that deliver premium experiences to their customers– all with best-in-class price performance. More than 30% of the Fortune 100 trust Couchbase to power their modern applications and build innovative new ones. See our recent awards to learn why Couchbase is a great place to work.We are honored to be a part of the Best Places to Work Award for the Bay Area and the UK. Couchbase offers a total rewards approach to benefits that recognizes the value you create here, so that you in turn may best serve yourself and your family. Some benefits include:
- 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!
*Note: some programs are not applicable to all countries. Please discuss with a Couchbase recruiter to learn more.
Learn more about Couchbase:
News and Press Releases
Couchbase Capella
Couchbase Blog
Investors
News and Press Releases
Couchbase Capella
Couchbase Blog
Investors
Disclaimer:
Couchbase is committed to being an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Join an impact initiative group and experience the amazing feeling of Couchbase can-do culture.
By using this website and submitting your information, you acknowledge our Candidate Privacy Notice and understand your personal information may be processed in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Notice following guidelines in your country of application.
Top Skills
Ai Tools
Figma
Couchbase London, England Office
11-21 Paul Street, London, United Kingdom, EC2A 4JU
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