Staff Product Designer

Sonatype is the software supply chain security company. We provide the world’s best end-to-end software supply chain security solution, combining the only proactive protection against malicious open source, the only enterprise grade SBOM management and the leading open source dependency management platform. This empowers enterprises to create and maintain secure, quality, and innovative software at scale.

As founders of Nexus Repository and stewards of Maven Central, the world’s largest repository of Java open-source software, we are software pioneers and our open source expertise is unmatched. We empower innovation with an unparalleled commitment to build faster, safer software and harness AI and data intelligence to mitigate risk, maximize efficiencies, and drive powerful software development.

More than 2,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 100 and 15 million software developers, rely on Sonatype to optimize their software supply chains.

Sonatype is evolving how product design works inside a modern engineering organization. We’re moving beyond static artifacts and toward designing in code, co-creating solutions with engineering and PM, and leveraging AI to accelerate iteration and handoff.

If you’re a product designer who thrives on understanding complex developer workflows, building real prototypes, and shaping UX with your team (not in an isolated design bubble), you’ll be right at home here.

What You Will Do:
• Develop a deep understanding of Sonatype’s multi-product developer platform, personas, and core jobs to be done.
• Work closely with PMs and engineers to co-create user flows and experience direction — UX leads the thinking, but the outputs are created and iterated on together, not in isolation.
• Map complex IA, developer workflows, permissions models, and multi-product interactions into clear, intuitive experience patterns.
• Create user and product flows in Miro that reflect real constraints, technical realities, and team input.
• Shape conceptual designs and UX architectures for new features and continuous, iterative improvements — not large-scale redesigns.
• Build coded UX prototypes using Claude Code, VS Code, GitHub workflows, and front-end fundamentals (HTML/CSS/JS/React). These prototypes behave like real product experiences.
• Ensure your prototypes are structured enough that AI tools can generate engineering specs, scope definitions, and implementation requirements directly from your code diffs.
• Conduct lightweight, practical research (interviews, surveys, UAT, quick validation) when needed — and know when to proceed without research to keep momentum.
• Collaborate early and often to align constraints, scope, design direction, and technical feasibility.

What Success Looks Like:
• Your prototypes aren’t just illustrative — they behave like real product experiences and provide enough structure for AI tools to generate engineering specs, scope, and implementation requirements directly from your code diffs.
• Teams ship better UX because your influence is pragmatic, collaborative, and grounded in technical realities.
• You consistently transform complex developer workflows into clear, coherent experiences.
• You make smart calls about when to research and when to ship.
• You adapt fluidly to evolving tools, processes, and AI-assisted workflows.
• You communicate clearly with engineers, PMs, and stakeholders — zooming in or out as needed.

What We Are Looking For:
• Significant experience designing enterprise software or developer platforms (typically 10–15+ years), with the maturity to influence across multiple product teams.
• Experience collaborating deeply with engineers; hybrid UX/engineering backgrounds are a strong plus.
• Skilled at lightweight research (interviews, surveys, usability tests, UAT).
• Able to choose the right level of research for the moment — avoiding slow, academic processes.
• You don’t need to be a full-stack engineer, but you must be comfortable building working UX prototypes:
• Strong UX judgment, especially in complex technical domains.
• Ability to simplify aggressively within real constraints.
• Collaborative, positive, and non-defensive — thrives in evolving workflows.
• Clear communicator who works well with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• AI Mindset: Curious, experimental, and excited to incorporate AI into design workflows. Comfortable using AI for structure, exploration, prototyping, and iteration.

This Role Is Not For You If . . .:
• Your first instinct is to open Figma to figure out what the team should build.
• You prefer long discovery cycles, polished spec packages, or designing every state before engineering begins.
• Code-based prototyping feels uncomfortable or outside your identity as a designer.
• You want to “own UX” rather than collaborate with engineers who share UX responsibility.
• You need structured process, predictable phases, or linear design workflows.
• You feel frustrated by changing tools, evolving methods, or AI-assisted workflows.

Why Join Sonatype:
• Influence UX across a multi-product developer platform used at massive scale.
• Prototype in real code environments and shape the future of design/engineering collaboration.
• Help build an AI-accelerated design workflow that’s growing and evolving quickly.
• Work with engineers who genuinely care about UX.
• Contribute to a collaborative UX Guild culture focused on quality, not ceremony.
• Solve deep, technical UX challenges — not marketing flows or surface-level UI.
• If you’re a designer who thinks in systems, builds in code, collaborates closely with engineers, and gets energy from evolving how design is done — this is the role for you.

At Sonatype, we value diversity and inclusivity. We offer perks such as parental leave, diversity and inclusion working groups, and flexible working practices to allow our employees to show up as their whole selves. We are an equal-opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.