Product Designer, Foundations (Design System/UI Design)

Our entire handbook is public. You can find the details of our vision & direction, check out how we structure our R&D teams, and understand how our UX team operates.

A brief overview

As a Product Designer or Senior Product Designer at GitLab, you’ll report to a Product Design Manager and work 1:1 with a Product Manager embedded in our Foundations group. You'll help beautify the GitLab UI, refine our Pajamas Design System, and improve our accessibility.

What you can expect in a Product Designer, Foundations role at GitLab

• Lead the design of components within the design system and support product teams to utilize and contribute to our design language and standards.
• Provide regular feedback to designers, engineers, and product managers on monthly deliverables, advocating for system thinking and strong visual design.
• Contribute to design system guidelines and processes.
• Help shift accessibility left by improving processes and advocating for inclusive design thinking earlier in the workflow.
• Perform component and page accessibility evaluations and Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) updates.
• Become a leading contributor to the Pajamas UI Kit in Figma, helping to improve DesignOps as new Figma features are released.
• Contribute to GitLab SVGs, creating illustrations and icons that follow the guidelines.
• Utilize sketches, wireframes, user flows, mockups, hi-fidelity visual designs, prototypes, and any other artifacts you believe are necessary to convey your design thinking and ideas.
• Partner with your manager, Product Manager, and UX Researchers on problem validation studies to understand the problem space you're operating within.
• Leverage solution validation studies to validate solutions and proposed direction.

Projects you will work on in our Foundations group

You’ll help define the UX vision for the Foundations group, particularly the design system category. You’ll translate the product roadmap into deliverables, improve both the usability and visual design of the product, and help improve processes that contribute to design efficiency. By the end of your first year, you’ll be a go-to member within the UX department for feedback on a range of topics from UI design and accessibility, to Figma best practices and beyond.

A current focus for the Foundations group is migrating legacy components in the product to utilize our design system, which includes performing accessibility evaluations to ensure components are compliant with standards. In the near future, our goal is to expand this effort to include implementation of our type scales and improve responsive behavior. The design system direction page also includes creating a dark mode that is scalable, accessible, and paves the way for other themes. Additionally, we continue to improve the visual design of the product and are currently advocating for unboxing our UI.

You should apply if:

• You’ve helped create a design system and contributed to improving DesignOps.
• You excel at creating beautifully executed illustrations and enterprise UI design.
• Creating streamlined UI interactions is truly exciting to you.
• You have a strong working knowledge of accessibility guidelines (WCAG) and a track record of advocating for accessibility improvements and prioritization.
• You have experience with Section 508 Standards and are familiar with VPATs.
• You understand frontend code and the limitations of frontend technology. You can demonstrate this through hands-on coding skills with HTML/CSS/JS/Vue, experience with Git, or by showing a deep understanding of the needs of engineers you've worked with previously.
• You’ve worked for a company that builds and maintains a deeply complex product.
• You’re humble and able to freely discuss your own strengths and weaknesses (and those of others), but always in a kind, professional, and appropriate way.
• You can adopt the behaviors we expect of a Manager of One.
• Our values of Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Iteration, and Transparency resonate with you.
• You'll thrive in an environment where self-learning and self-service are encouraged and instilled as a part of our culture.
• You enjoy collaborating with cross-functional counterparts.

What it's like to work at GitLab

The culture at GitLab is something we're incredibly proud of. You'll spend your time collaborating with kind, talented, and motivated colleagues from across the globe.

Some of the benefits you'll be entitled to vary by the region or country you're in. However, all GitLab team members are fully remote and receive a "no ask, must tell" paid-time-off policy, where we don't count the number of days you take off annually.

You can work incredibly flexible hours, enabled by our asynchronous approach to communication. We'll also help you set up your home office environment, pay for your membership to a co-working space and contribute to the travel costs associated with meeting other GitLab employees across the world. Also, every year or so, we'll invite you to our Contribute event.

Our hiring process and compensation:

The hiring process for this Product Designer position typically follows five stages. The details of this process can be found at the bottom of our job family page. Our compensation calculator will be shared with candidates selected for a screening call.