Staff Product Design Engineer

Staff Product Design Engineer

Location: Remote (Germany)

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from European time zones only at this time.

About Grafana Labs & the Product Design Engineering Team Grafana Labs provides an open and composable monitoring and observability platform built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are more than 20M users of Grafana around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a SpaceX launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies—including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay—manage their observability strategies with full-stack offerings that can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud, or self-managed with Grafana Enterprise Stack.

As part of our continued investment in product experience, we are establishing the Product Design Engineering (PDE) function within our Product Design organization. The PDE team’s mission is twofold:

• Provide Targeted Design and Engineering Support for High-Impact Initiatives – We will embed with teams to accelerate their frontend and UX development, ensuring they can scale confidently while maintaining high-quality user experiences. Embedding directly with teams will help us to accomplish our first goal in a user-centric way. 

• Drive 'Emerging Consistency' and Reduce Redundant Efforts – We will help create and evolve shared UI components and patterns to streamline frontend development across Grafana’s ecosystem. 

To help us establish and lead this function, we are looking for a Staff Product Design Engineer—an innovative, adaptable, and highly technical individual who thrives at the intersection of design and engineering.

About the Role

This is a foundational hire for the PDE team. As our first Staff Product Design Engineer, you will be instrumental in defining how the PDE function operates and delivering tangible impact across Grafana Labs’ product suite. This role combines strategic thinking, hands-on coding, and UX design expertise to create scalable, user-friendly solutions.

You will work directly with engineering teams to design, prototype, and implement user-facing solutions, ensuring they are maintainable and cohesive with the broader Grafana ecosystem. You will also contribute to evolving shared UI components that can be leveraged across multiple teams.

This role is ideal for someone who is passionate about crafting elegant, functional interfaces with support from Product Design while deeply understanding the underlying technical architecture.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead High-Impact Product Initiatives: Embed with engineering teams for 1-2 quarters at a time to accelerate design and frontend development for mission-critical projects.

• Prototype and Ship User-Centric Solutions: Rapidly create interactive UI components, ensuring seamless integration into existing workflows.

• Develop and Maintain Reusable UI Components: Lead the development of clean, accessible and highly reusable components in order to drive consistency and efficiency across our wider product suite.

• Collaborate with Teams Across the Company: Work closely with engineers, designers, and product managers across Grafana Labs to align on technical and design strategies.

• Mentor and Inspire: Guide engineers and designers on frontend best practices, accessibility, and scalable component design.

What We Are Looking For

• Founder Mentality: You’ll be a founding member of the team - which is a new function at Grafana! - so you will be expected to help define and shape the team. You’ll also have to operate autonomously to quickly design and build solutions in a highly ambiguous space. We are looking for self-starters who have a bias to action and who want to drive impact! 

• Extensive Experience: 8+ years in frontend engineering, design engineering, or a similar role.

• Strong Technical Background: Proficiency in React, TypeScript, Emotion and/or SaaS and modern frontend development best practices.

• Design Expertise: Deep understanding of UI/UX principles and interaction design. This role does not require that you use design tools like Figma - but you should have a strong understanding of Product Design principles and an interest in / experience with building UI components. 

• Prototyping & Rapid Iteration: Ability to build interactive prototypes in code or other tools (wireframes) to validate ideas quickly.

• Systems Thinking: Experience in creating and evolving design systems or component libraries at scale.

• Excellent Communication & Collaboration: Comfortable working cross-functionally in a remote-first environment.

• Problem-Solving Mindset: Thrives in ambiguity, balancing speed with quality to deliver impactful solutions.

Why Join Us?

• Be a Founding Member of a New Team: This is an opportunity to help define and establish a new function at Grafana Labs.

• Work on Meaningful Challenges: Tackle complex UI and UX problems while building experiences that impact millions of users worldwide.

• Autonomy & Impact: Drive initiatives from conception to execution, influencing both design and engineering teams.

• Remote-First Culture: Work in a truly remote-first culture while being part of a collaborative, globally distributed team.

In Germany, the base compensation range for this role is EUR 106,514 - EUR 127,817. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

*Compensation ranges are country-specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.