About JetBrains
We create intelligent software development tools for developers and teams. More than 15 million users, over 300,000 companies, and 88 of the Fortune Global Top 100 companies rely on our products to solve real, complex problems. Our mission is simple: make development teams more productive and AI adoptable at scale.
What you’ll do
YouTrack handles serious complexity – agile boards, backlogs, knowledge bases, helpdesks, and deeply customizable workflows – across teams from two-person startups to global enterprises. We need a Lead Product Designer to shape where project management goes next while keeping a massive, mature surface area coherent, legible, and a pleasant to use. In this role, you’ll lead a small design team of two designers, own the overall design quality bar across the product, and act as an individual contributor on our hardest, least-charted problems.
Day to day, you will:
- Shape a point of view on how project management and issue tracking evolve in an AI-native world and turn those concepts into tools people can actually use.
- Design how people work alongside AI capabilities in YouTrack, from conversational interfaces to inline assistance and background automation.
- Develop interaction patterns for unsettled problems, including surfacing AI confidence, making actions transparent, and keeping users in control.
- Prototype and test new concepts quickly, separating ideas that feel clever from those that genuinely reduce friction.
- Keep a large, deep product coherent so that boards, helpdesks, reports, and administration feel like a single cohesive engine.
- Partner with product management and engineering to shape roadmap priorities from a design perspective.
What you’ll bring
- A deep commitment to craft ownership, holding yourself and your team to high standards without creating bottlenecks.
- Comfort building clear, lightweight processes, without turning them into restrictive bureaucracy.
- The generosity to share knowledge openly and collaborate across a broad, global design community.
- Clarity in your writing and reasoning, with the ability to explain complex design decisions in plain words.
- Comfort with ambiguity and a healthy appetite for finding the right questions before designing the answers.
- Strong opinions, loosely held, with a clear understanding of when to follow platform conventions and when to break them.
What you’ll need
- Successfully led the design of complex, data-rich productivity tools or software systems where information architecture is a primary challenge.
- Proven understanding of how modern AI systems operate beyond single-turn prompts, including agentic workflows and multi-step execution.
- Experience mentoring and leading other designers, giving clear feedback that lands and raises the bar.
- Ability to design unified experiences that cater to small startup teams and large enterprise customers simultaneously.
- A portfolio showing a range of work from precise micro-interactions to large-scale information architecture.