Posted 20 May, 2026
Lead UX Designer
Couchbase, Inc.
Bangalore, India
Full Time
Reference: 102_713359_4621643006
Senior/Lead Product Designer
Role overview
Role overview
As a Lead Product Designer at Couchbase, you'll shape intuitive experiences for our flagship product, Capella, a cloud-native database-as-a-service platform. You'll lead design initiatives from concept to execution, transforming complex workflows into simple, scalable, and effective solutions for developers and enterprises. This role combines strategic thinking, hands-on design craft, and leadership to influence product direction and elevate the overall user experience.
You'll operate within established Capella UX direction, partnering closely with global design leadership to execute and scale high-quality design.
What you'll do
- Lead the design of end-to-end product experiences for Couchbase, with focus on Capella, from initial concept through polished execution.
- Collaborate with product and engineering to translate complex requirements into user-centered designs.
- Clarify requirements, identify constraints, and challenge assumptions to better define the problem space.
- Explore a wide breadth of design options and articulate tradeoffs for each approach.
- Deliver crisp, pixel-perfect, and robust high-fidelity designs, including edge cases and interactive states when relevant.
- Develop interactive prototypes to explore and validate new features, workflows, and interactions.
- Own design quality, completeness, and consistency for work delivered by the Bangalore design team.
- Ensure designs are production-ready, including edge cases, states, accessibility considerations, and engineering handoff.
- Collaborate closely with designers to co-design workflows, review work in progress, and maintain a shared quality bar for Capella UX.
- Balance speed, quality, and scalability when making design tradeoffs in a complex platform product.
- Partner with engineering early to clarify intent and constraints, reducing downstream design and implementation rework.
- Conduct lightweight, high-signal user research with developers and operators, and synthesize insights into actionable design decisions even when data is incomplete.
- Exercise sound design judgment and escalate cross-team UX decisions or tradeoffs when alignment cannot be reached.
- Give constructive design feedback and mentor junior designers.
- Maintain and evolve the Capella design system in partnership with engineering, ensuring consistency, scalability, and pragmatic adoption across teams.
Mandatory qualifications
- Experience designing products for specialized audiences such as developers, SREs, and DBAs; familiarity with database software is needed.
- Experience conducting user research and applying insights to design decisions.
Qualifications
- 8+ years experience as a UX or Product Designer, with a portfolio showcasing your best work.
- Proven ability to transform complex product briefs into simple, intuitive experiences.
- Strategic thinker who considers the big picture before diving into details and knows when to zoom out and when to zoom in. Understanding of systems thinking and the ability to factor in interdependencies between features.
- Excellent communication skills to articulate design concepts and rationale.
- Comfortable working in distributed teams and collaborating across time zones.
- Proficient with Figma and AI tools
