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Salary: USD 204,000 - 255,000 / annual
Datadog is seeking a Senior Design Manager to lead the DRUIDS design system team—the design infrastructure behind every Datadog product surface, used daily by 100+ designers and thousands of engineers across 30+ products.
In this hands-on leadership role, you will set the strategic direction for the design system, own its quality bar, and build the tools that enable designing in code as the default workflow. You'll lead a team of designers and design engineers, partner closely with product designers, frontend engineers, and PMs across the company, and shape how Datadog's product looks and feels in an AI-forward world.
Key responsibilities include:
**Lead the team and set direction:** Define what DRUIDS owns and ships, establish the system's roadmap, coach team members on craft and ownership, and hire as the team grows. You'll have a clear point of view on what a design system should be and the authority to defend it.
**Own craft and quality:** Set the quality bar for components, patterns, and principles. Make the call when work isn't good enough yet. Raise product quality through the system and influence how design gets made across the company.
**Own the tooling:** Manage the infrastructure that makes the system usable—workflows, formats, and surfaces. Work out how design quality gets evaluated by both people and AI agents, and decide what the system ships beyond components.
**Stay close to product design:** Keep a pulse on what's being built and where teams struggle. Define how the system shows up for product teams and make it something they want to use.
This is a technical, engineering-forward environment. Much of what a design system should be hasn't been settled—here or anywhere else. If you're a designer who never stopped making things and would rather decide what a system should be than maintain an existing one, this is the role.
Datadog operates as a hybrid workplace to support work-life harmony.
**Requirements:**
- 8+ years in product design, with 3+ years managing
- Proven experience managing a design system team and growing it
- Ability to read and write front-end code and have substantive conversations about it
- Strong design skills with a clear point of view
- Excellent communication and feedback skills that improve quality and direction
- Ability to build relationships with fellow leaders and influence them
- Experience developing reports and managing performance issues
- Desire to work in an engineering-forward company
