Design Lead

About Us

At Dagster Labs, our mission is simple but ambitious: to empower every organization to build a productive, scalable data platform. We’re the brains behind Dagster, the open-source tool developers love, and Dagster+, our managed cloud. From scrappy startups to global enterprises, thousands of teams trust us to power the data behind their analytics, machine learning, and AI breakthroughs.

We believe the AI era runs on reliable, high-quality data. That’s why we make data platforms easier to test, easier to understand, and actually enjoyable to use. Dagster is quickly becoming the backbone of how the world builds intelligent systems, and the best AI companies are built on top of Dagster.

We’re a small, well-funded team with big energy and a track record of shipping software people rave about. We aim high and work as a team, holding ourselves to the highest standards and trusting eachother to deliver. We care about how we work together: no egos, no drama, just a lot of curiosity and a drive to make something meaningful.

If you want to help shape the future of data and AI and have fun doing it, come build with us.

About the Role

As a Design Lead at Dagster Labs, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Dagster’s user experience across both product and brand. Design is a key differentiator for Dagster, and we operate as one cohesive design team across product and brand – this means you’ll have influence over how things work and look across our users’ entire end-to-end journey.

You’ll work closely with engineers, product leaders, and a deeply collaborative team of design peers to set direction, raise the bar for execution, and ensure clarity and cohesion across surfaces. In addition to owning complex design work yourself, you'll manage and develop a small team of designers, providing creative leadership, coaching, and structured feedback to support their growth.

Designers at Dagster Labs are empowered to engage directly with our active open-source community (you can join our community Slack here to see it firsthand). We’re a small, ambitious team with no shortage of challenging and impactful design problems. Your work will meaningfully influence the product, the brand, and the overall user experience.

This is a full-time position offering competitive salary, equity, and benefits. We are a distributed team with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis. We’re open to hiring fully remote candidates who are currently authorized to work within the United States. We offer flexible remote work options so you can choose the environment that makes you most productive—whether that’s your home or a coworking space. Dagster Labs fosters a collaborative, remote-first culture, ensuring you have all the tools and support needed to thrive, no matter where you are.

Responsibilities

• Manage and support a small team of designers, including regular 1:1s, performance feedback, and career development.

• Own and execute end-to-end design work to elevate the quality and direction of the Dagster UI and brand, setting a high bar for craft.

• Partner closely with product, engineering, and design peers to drive alignment and ship thoughtful, high-impact features.

• Create clear, compelling design artifacts that guide development and solve real user and business problems.

• Proactively identify opportunities to improve the user experience and shape new product capabilities that delight data engineers.

• Engage with the Dagster open-source community, Dagster+ customers, and customer support teams, to understand user needs and validate designs

• Collaborate with and mentor design peers while helping evolve our design system, patterns, and brand foundations.

Must-have Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience designing enterprise-grade software, with a portfolio that demonstrates strong systems thinking and high-quality craft

• Exceptional attention to detail with a passion for refined visual and interaction design.

• Strong collaborator who thrives in cross-functional environments and excels at guiding teams through iterative, co-creative processes.

• Mastered design tools like Figma to explore, prototype, and communicate ideas effectively.

• Experience running lightweight qualitative user research sessions

• Great storyteller with clear written and verbal communication.

• Experience mentoring or managing designers, with the ability to support both craft development and career growth.

Nice-to-have Qualifications

• Experience designing tools for developers or data practitioners.

• Experience using developer tools like Git, VSCode, React, Vercel

• Experience with Webflow

You Belong Here

We are committed to building an inclusive team and an open-source community where no one feels out of place. We know that teams with diverse backgrounds state their assumptions more explicitly, think more rigorously, and build better software. Plus it's more fun and interesting to work with a wide variety of perspectives.

You should apply to work at Dagster Labs if you want to work in, and help to build and strengthen, a high-performing software development environment where people of all backgrounds are welcome.

The estimated cash salary for this role is $185,000 to $270,000.

Other Resources

• What is Dagster, a guide to the problems we solve and the philosophy driving our approach

• A Look Inside the Dagster Labs Culture

• Our Latest Dagster Release

• Introducing the new Dagster+ UI

• Introducing Compass

• Data Platform Week 2024 blog post & video playlist