Senior Design Lead (Developer Experience) at Apollo GraphQL

At Apollo GraphQL, we're on a mission to make it radically easier for engineering teams to ship fast, reliable products and services on top of the world's data, powering everything from web to mobile to agentic experiences.

Apollo supports some of the largest GraphQL APIs in the world. Companies like Walmart, Expedia, Peloton, DoorDash, and The New York Times are just a small sample of Apollo's customers. We're not looking to rest on our laurels, though — we're aiming to change how software is built.

What consumes an API is changing. Increasingly it's an agent acting on someone's behalf — one that needs a graph it can traverse and controls over what it can reach. That's the next thing we're building, and design will decide whether it's usable or not.

Are you with us? If so, read on...

About the role

You'll help decide where design effort creates the most value at Apollo, then build it — starting with our core developer experience, the tools engineers use daily to build, test, and manage their APIs. From there, you'll have real range: another major product area, the onboarding experience for new developers, our design system, and the interfaces our AI agents use are all open ground, depending on where the opportunity is biggest.

This isn't a role where someone hands you a spec. You'll form your own point of view on what's worth building, make the case for it, and own it through to what ships.

What you'll do

• Assess Apollo's product surfaces end to end, identify where design effort creates the most leverage, and drive that work from idea through execution.

• Lead the modernization of our core developer experiences — turning a set of powerful but disconnected features into coherent journeys.

• Partner with engineering as a peer, not a downstream recipient of requirements — bring your own point of view on what should get built, and make the case for it.

• Set design and craft standards that other builders — designers, PMs, and engineers alike — actually adopt, contributing patterns to our design system that speed up delivery beyond your own team.

• Know when a decision needs real usability testing and when it doesn't.

• Tie your design work to something the business measures: developer activation, time-to-first-successful-API-call, or support cost tied to a confusing flow.

Who you are

Minimum requirements

• 12+ years designing software, with a portfolio of shipped work.

• Experience designing technically complex products for technical users — developer tools, infrastructure, data, security, identity, or APIs.

• A track record of identifying high-leverage problems yourself and designing end-to-end solutions.

• Strong visual design and craft skills.

• Skilled at operating independently to turn ambiguous problems into cohesive vision.

• A track record of driving your own work: proactively surfacing problems and building alignment with engineering rather than waiting for direction.

Nice to have

• Shipped developer-focused experiences, API tooling, or agent experiences.

• An engineering or developer background, or have contributed production code.

• Comfortable moving fluidly between high-altitude thinking and interaction/craft details.

• Work fluently within a design system, and know when to work outside it.

• An avid user of AI design tools — able to describe what you use, for what, and where the limits are.