Senior Design Manager - Observability

What is The Role

We are seeking a Product Design Manager who excels in both leadership and hands-on contribution. While your primary focus will be on managing and mentoring a team, you’ll also be ready to roll up your sleeves to review designs and provide clear direction and actionable guidance.

In this role, you will be an integral part of both the Security and Observability teams, with a primary focus on advancing our Observability initiatives. You’ll lead a team driving innovation in GenAI-powered UX, Advanced Analytics, Analyst experiences, and Investigation workflows. Your role will include shaping and overseeing the product design roadmap, supporting the team in aligning their work with the broader Observability design strategy, and fostering a culture of excellence and growth.

Collaborating closely with other design managers, you will align on priorities and approaches to ensure a cohesive and consistent user experience across Elastic’s portfolio. You’ll also work alongside the Design Director to evolve and refine Elastic’s Observability design strategy, maintaining a balance between strategic oversight and diving into details to support timely and high-quality execution.

Key responsibilities include removing blockers for your team, providing strategic guidance aligned with our overarching design vision, and ensuring the successful delivery of projects.

You will contribute to advancing design excellence within Elastic by collaborating with other solution design teams, the central design system team, and cross-functional partners. Your work will help shape design systems, cross-organizational design processes, and foster alignment to ensure consistency and scalability across Elastic’s products.

Applications without a link to a Portfolio or a Case Study will not be considered. We appreciate your understanding.

What You Will Be Doing

• Support, influence, and lead the creation and management of the product design roadmap in line with the broader Observability design strategy.


• Mentor and support designers, helping them to develop their skills and careers


• Work with other design managers to prioritize projects and align design approaches, taking a holistic view of the user experience and ensuring that it is consistent across all products and platforms.


• Manage the team's work balance to ensure optimal productivity and creativity, while also paying close attention to the details of the design process and the user experience.


• Help execute projects on time by ensuring that the team is meeting milestones and deadlines


• Unblock projects by providing clear tactical directions that are inline with the design strategy


• Dive into details while staying strategic, balancing the need for excellence in execution with the need to be responsive to business needs


• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure design is integrated into product development

What You Bring 

• 5+ years of experience in product design management


• Strong leadership and communication skills


• Experience with managing product design roadmaps and delivering products on time without sacrificing quality.


• Ability to mentor and support designers to help them develop their skills and careers


• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to navigate ambiguity


• Experience with cross-functional collaboration and ability to work with stakeholders from multiple departments


• Excellent understanding of design principles, trends, and best practices


• Ability to balance attention to detail with the ability to stay focused on the big picture

Bonus Points

• Understanding and experience in designing UIs that handle extensive data.


• Strong background in SaaS platform design and usability.


• Proficiency in creating and improving complex workflow designs.


• Experience in the Observability space, such as monitoring, logging, tracing, or alerting, is highly valuable, given the complexity and technical depth of the domain.