Lead Product Designer (YouTrack)

You see software development and team organization not as a rigid set of rules, but as a craft that deserves better tools. You want to design complex, data-rich productivity platforms where information architecture is a first-class problem, and you want to rethink how humans work alongside AI. If you are a designer who values hands-on craft, hates unnecessary bureaucracy, and wants the autonomy to build a team's design process from scratch, this role was built for you.

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.

YouTrack handles serious complexity – agile boards, backlogs, knowledge bases, helpdesks, and deeply customizable workflows – across teams from two-person startups to global enterprises. We’re at a point where the category's oldest assumptions are worth reconsidering. Issue tracking has relied on the same foundational blocks for years, but AI opens an opportunity to rethink how software can actively help teams get work done.

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. You’ll build a fresh design process from scratch with the full backing of a team lead who respects craft and values professional judgment.

• 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, influencing what gets built and why.

• 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.

• 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.

Success means earning the trust of your team and peers through sound interaction choices and clear systemic improvements. You will establish a reliable critique rhythm and a structured way of working that helps your designers grow. Within your first few months, delivering clear patterns for our AI capabilities, paying down accumulated UX debt, and ensuring YouTrack remains both deep and remarkably quick on its feet.