Staff Product Designer (Dev Portal)

Kong Inc.

Job Overview

Location

United States

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Design exceptional end-to-end experiences for Kong’s Developer Portal, leading complex projects from early concepting through final UI delivery while upholding the company’s design system and standards.
• Apply systems thinking to improve cohesion and usability across the entire product surface, identifying opportunities to enhance alignment and consistency beyond isolated features.
• Conduct independent user research to deeply understand developer needs, jobs-to-be-done, and pain points, then translate insights into actionable design improvements.
• Make data-informed design decisions by analyzing metrics, instrumentation, and experimentation results from technical product usage in a B2B SaaS environment.
• Champion customer needs by identifying underperforming areas of the product and making compelling, evidence-based cases for iterative improvements that directly impact user satisfaction and business outcomes.
• Solicit diverse feedback early and often from product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders to strengthen design solutions and ensure alignment across teams.
• Communicate design rationale clearly through written and verbal storytelling, articulating customer data, business impact, trade-offs, and prioritization logic to drive consensus and forward progress.
• Proactively educate non-design teams on effective collaboration practices, setting clear expectations around design input, timelines, and deliverables to improve cross-functional efficiency.
• Maintain ownership of design initiatives by consistently communicating progress, risks, blockers, and timeline changes to stakeholders without being prompted.
• Take initiative to improve team processes, refine design workflows, and elevate the maturity of the design function within a fast-growing, technically complex organization.
• Mentor junior designers by modeling best practices in research, usability, documentation, and communication, and by providing constructive feedback to grow the team’s overall capability.
• Design for highly technical developer audiences, translating complex API and AI workflows into intuitive, accessible interfaces that accommodate system constraints and technical depth.
• Create pixel-perfect, aesthetically refined UI components and interactions that align with brand standards while ensuring accessibility and scalability across multiple platforms and devices.
• Contribute meaningfully to the evolution of the shared design system by proposing updates, auditing consistency, and ensuring reusable components meet the needs of diverse technical product areas.
• Balance creative freedom with operational discipline, delivering high-quality designs under tight deadlines in a dynamic, high-growth environment where impact is measurable and immediate.
• Collaborate closely with engineering teams to ensure design feasibility, understand technical limitations, and advocate for user-centered solutions within architectural constraints.

🎯 Requirements

• At least 6+ years of product design experience, preferably in developer tools or B2B SaaS environments
• Portfolio demonstrating expertise in end-to-end design process: research, definition, prototyping, testing, and delivery
• Proven ability to conduct independent user research and make data-informed design decisions using metrics and instrumentation
• Demonstrated success designing complex, technical interfaces for developers, including APIs, CLI tools, or DevOps platforms
• Strong communication and storytelling skills—written and verbal—to influence stakeholders and align cross-functional teams
• Experience working with and contributing to a shared design system and established team design processes

🏖️ Benefits

• Opportunity to shape the future of API and AI connectivity at a well-funded, fast-growing company trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises
• Collaborative, high-impact environment with direct influence on product direction and customer experience
• Exposure to cutting-edge technologies in the agentic AI and developer infrastructure space
• Remote-friendly work arrangement across the United States
• Access to a mature design system and established product design team with room for growth and mentorship
• Competitive compensation package and equity options

Skills & Technologies

Design

Senior

Onsite

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Kong Inc.

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About Kong Inc.

Kong Inc. is a San Francisco-based software company that develops an open-source API gateway and service connectivity platform. The company offers Kong Gateway, Kong Mesh, and Konnect cloud services to manage, secure, and observe microservices and APIs across clouds and data centers. Founded in 2007 as Mashape, it rebranded to Kong in 2017. Kong’s technology provides traffic control, authentication, rate limiting, and analytics for modern distributed architectures, supporting organizations in digital transformation and cloud-native adoption.

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