Senior Staff Visual Designer, Design Lab

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About the role

Datadog is entering a new chapter in how our product looks, feels and operates. We're building a small, high-leverage Design Lab team to define that evolution, and we're looking for a Senior Staff Visual Designer to author it. Our design system powers everything we ship. Now we're ready to evolve it. As Datadog expands into AI-driven experiences and more complex product surfaces, the visual language needs to grow with it. This is the role that decides what that language is — someone with taste, judgment, and the confidence to set a direction and defend it. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You'll Do • Define and evolve Datadog’s visual language across product surfaces. • Lead exploratory and concept work, creating a range of distinct visual directions for the next generation of the product. • Synthesize product context, research, references, and stakeholder input into clear visual principles and a coherent point of view. • Establish the quality bar for typography, color, composition, iconography, imagery, motion, and visual expression across the platform. • Create high-fidelity product exemplars and prototypes that make an emerging direction tangible. • Partner deeply with Brand, Product Design, Motion, and Design Systems to test and refine the direction across different surfaces. • Influence executives and senior stakeholders through clear, persuasive visual storytelling. • Guide and critique the work of other designers, helping the visual direction remain coherent as it evolves. • Help shape how visual exploration, critique, and craft are integrated into Datadog’s design process. You will report directly to the Design Director and work as part of a small, focused team defining the future state before it scales across hundreds of designers and engineers. Who You Are • You have 12+ years of experience in visual, brand, graphic and/or product design. • You have strong taste and are comfortable defending a point of view on judgment alone. • You can develop several different directions, synthesize the strongest ideas, and explain why one should move forward. • Your craft is top-shelf and know how to create the thing in your head. • You understand how typography, color, composition, imagery, iconography, and motion work together to create a coherent visual language. • You can move a room, executives included, with a story and a compelling artifact. • You're comfortable operating in ambiguity and defining direction where none exists. • Your portfolio demonstrates exceptional visual craft and authorship, not just applied systems work. Brand and agency backgrounds are welcome here. You do not need to come from a traditional product-design path, but you should understand how visual ideas behave when they enter digital products. Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re passionate about technology and want to grow your skills, we encourage you to apply. Why This Role Matters DRUIDS powers every Datadog experience. The decisions made in this role will shape how millions of interactions feel across web, mobile, and emerging AI-driven surfaces. This is an opportunity to define visual direction inside a complex, engineering-forward platform and raise the craft bar across the organization. About Datadog Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re passionate about technology and want to grow your sk

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