Product Designer (.NET Ecosystem)

Microsoft estimates there are 7M+ monthly active .NET developers worldwide. Our tools – Rider, ReSharper, and various profilers – reach roughly half of them. These users are experts with strong habits and strong opinions. They know exactly how they want to work – which makes them one of the hardest audiences to design for, and one of the most rewarding. Your craft really matters here.

We’re looking for a product designer to own end-to-end experiences across the .NET ecosystem. You’ll partner with engineers and product managers who treat design as a strategic input, not a final polish step, and you’ll ship work that developers use every single day.

You’ll move across products rather than specializing in one, which means holding complexity in your head and making decisions that work across contexts. You’ll also coordinate with the broader IntelliJ Platform design team – JetBrains builds IDEs across dozens of languages, and ecosystem coherence matters. 

The .NET ecosystem includes:

• Rider – a cross-platform .NET IDE competing with Visual Studio.
• ReSharper – the Visual Studio extension that started it all.
• Profilers – performance and memory analysis tools (dotTrace and dotMemory).
• VS Code extensions – lightweight tooling for broader reach.
• Cross-product experiences – onboarding, licensing, AI integration, and discoverability.

You’ll work on whatever needs design attention, which shifts based on priorities. Recent examples include: designing an overlay system that gives ReSharper its own identity inside Visual Studio without adding clutter, integrating AI assistance into GameDev workflows where context matters enormously, and making monitoring tools feel like part of the IDE rather than separate expert software.

Expect variety and sophisticated challenges.

• →Own the design process from early research through shipped pixels –not just the middle part.
• →Work across multiple products while maintaining ecosystem coherence.
• →Partner with product managers, engineers, and researchers to shape product direction (you’ll have a seat at the table, not just a chair in the corner).
• →Conduct and participate in user research: interviews, usability testing, and design validation.
• →Build in Figma – fast, organized, with prototypes that actually communicate intent.
• →Navigate complex technical domains and translate them into clear, usable experiences.
• →Contribute to design system, and pattern documentation.
• →Present and defend your design decisions to stakeholders and leadership.

• Strong product design craft: You can take on a problem from research through to delivering a polished UX, and you sweat the details others miss.
• Figma fluency: You’re fast, your files are organized, and you can build prototypes complex enough to test real interactions.
• Comfort with technical complexity: You’re willing to design for domains you don’t fully understand yet, and you learn quickly.
• Systems thinking: You can hold multiple products in your head and design for ecosystem coherence, not just individual screens.
• Independence: You drive projects forward without waiting for direction.
• Research capability: You can run user interviews, synthesize findings, and turn them into design decisions.
• Basic coding literacy: You don’t need to ship production code, but you’ve written enough to know what a breakpoint is, why a build might fail, and what developers actually experience when they work.
• Clear communication: You can explain your reasoning to engineers, PMs, and leadership – and you can push back when needed.

• A developer background or engineering mindset: you understand how software gets built.
• Experience designing developer tools, technical products, or complex professional software.
• Opinions about how IDEs should work, backed by actual usage.

You’ll join a small design team (currently 3 people, including the lead) embedded in the .NET ecosystem. We’re building out our practices – prioritization frameworks, intake systems, and research processes – so you’ll shape how we work, not just what we ship.

The broader .NET organization includes product managers, engineers, QA, researchers, marketing managers, and technical writers across multiple products. Design partners with all of them. Here’s the thing: The engineers building these tools are also .NET developers – they’re your users. You’ll sit alongside the people whose workflows you’re designing for. That’s one of the rarest feedback loops in product design, and it changes how you work.

• Your users are experts. Developers are the most demanding audience – and the most rewarding. They’ll notice your craft. And they won’t stay silent when something breaks their flow.
• The problems are genuinely hard. Complex domains, professional users, real constraints – no landing pages.
• You’ll have ownership. Autonomy over your work, input on strategy, and accountability for outcomes.
• You’ll build the practice. We’re growing design’s influence here, and you’ll help define what that looks like.

To be clear about what this role isn’t:

• This is not a marketing or brand design role.
• This is not a frontend development position (though these skills would be a plus).
• This is not a role where you’ll execute specs handed down from above.

Send your portfolio, CV, and a brief cover letter explaining why this role interests you. We care about how you think: Your CV tells us where you’ve been, your portfolio and letter will tell us how you approach work. If you don’t check every box above but you’re excited about this opportunity, apply anyway – we’d rather meet you than miss you.