Principal Product Designer – Apollo GraphQL
Design
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Apollo GraphQL (201-500 Employees, 356% 2 Yr Employee Growth Rate)
122% 1-Year Employee Growth Rate | 356% 2-Year Employee Growth Rate | LinkedIn | $183.2M Venture Funding
What Is Employee Growth Rate & Why Is It Important?
Overview
Apollo is all about building tools to help builders focus more on the what of their product, instead of the how. We are at the heart of a significant shift in how product developers interact with data through APIs – graduating from REST APIs to GraphQL – and we are helping an A-list set of technology companies ship solutions to their customers faster and more reliably. Our customer list includes the New York Times, Peloton, Netflix, Walmart, and many more.
We raised $130 million last year at a $1.5B valuation, so we're growing quickly. Despite that, our design team is still small and nascent. We're looking for some new folks to help us establish the future of design at Apollo. We're in the sweet spot of company growth right now where we've learned a lot of the tough early startup lessons, and we have the resources to accomplish what we want to now, but our teams are still agile and can move very quickly. Your impact will be broad and noticeable, both within the company and to our customers at large.
We’re looking for a Principal Designer to partner closely with product and engineering counterparts to up-level the quality of our experiences. Ultimately, we’re looking for people who are excited about our mission and up for the challenge of being an early leader as we build out a world-class design team in a hyper-growth company. You’ll have the opportunity to think and act big, delivering highly visible software used by many of the world’s most innovative companies.
What you will do
- You’ll embed with a product delivery team to work on one of the product surfaces described above
- You’ll work closely with PMs, engineers, and other functions from around the company to translate user needs into design work that is functional and appealing.
- You will be responsible for driving the design process of one more teams and propelling projects to completion – working closely with PMs, UXRs, and engineering leads to define projects for engineering teams
- In this role you’ll be continuously innovating, doing thoughtful experimentation, and delivering solid artifacts.
Design initiatives coming up
- New features in our GraphQL IDE, the Explorer, which is used by more than 100k developers a month
- Revamping our product onboarding and developing a purchase flow for a new product line
- Visualize GraphQL schemas and their changes over time (dense data presentation/IA work)
- Configure “Schema Contracts” (configuration wizard)
- Understand how your schema is being used and who’s using it (data visualizations)
- and much more!
About you
- You're familiar with designing for information-dense products. Our users prefer to consume more information rather than less, and they prefer to configure and personalize as many of their experience as possible. This type of design challenge is exciting to you.
- You’re familiar with modern design tools like Figma and/or Sketch
- You’re versed in the theory behind color and typography selections online, progressive disclosure, grid layouts, designing for responsive layouts, etc. Championing consistency and cohesion is second nature to you.
- You understand the basics of web accessibility and apply those concepts to your work.
- You know how to build design systems and can generalize components of your delivery work into design systems work where appropriate.
- You know how to explore a design problem in multiple directions before converging on any one in particular.
- You know how to work with product managers, researchers, and engineering teams to drive projects from concept development to production ship, and you can navigate the team dynamics therein.
- You keep your skills sharp and your taste refined by engaging with the larger design community and other sources of inspiration and professional development.
- You have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS and how they impact how designs are implemented. Big plus if you like jumping into the CSS code yourself and collaborating with engineers on pull requests.
- You have design opinions on most products that you use and generally think your own taste is pretty good. You can feel the satisfaction of a beautiful interface the moment you spot it.
Other Info
This position can be done from anywhere with US time zones.
Apollo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a talented and diverse workforce.
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