Introduction

A career in IBM Software means you’ll be leading the teams that transform our customers’ challenges into world-class solutions.

You will be leading a design team dedicated to HashiCorp’s industry-leading suite of security products. As the standard for cloud infrastructure automation, HashiCorp products (like Vault and Boundary) are critical to the world’s largest organizations. We are seeking a leader who understands the delicate balance between robust security and seamless developer experience.

Our door is open for a visionary leader who wants to build and guide a team to deliver winning results in the high-stakes world of Zero Trust security and identity management.

Your role and responsibilities

Vault is a complex product customers rely on to secure their most critical systems and workloads. If you love solving interesting, novel problems, this is a role you’ll enjoy. You will work closely with other Product Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers to research, define, execute, and deliver high-quality designs.

As part of a distributed, hybrid team, you’ll create seamless experiences by delivering research plans, user flows, mockups, and prototypes to help communicate design directions to the team.

• Be a passionate designer who thrives in uncertainty and ambiguity.

• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering teams to set priorities, goals, and roadmaps, and help guide product innovations from early concepts to GA release.

• Own the end-to-end design process, develop a domain understanding of our products and the JTBDs for our users.

• Combine research and creativity to deliver practical, elegant solutions for technical users, validating designs through generative research, user testing, and analytics.

• Partner with engineers on feasibility, responsiveness, and details of components.

• Work iteratively in a dynamic environment, adapting quickly to user and stakeholder feedback to refine and enhance designs.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• You have experience designing for complex technical experiences, especially for enterprise IT and security products.

• You enjoy working collaboratively with a distributed remote team.

• You value feedback, and seeking ways to learn and grow as a designer.

• You are a problem solver, you take ownership of your work, and you focus on delivering impact.

• You are comfortable working across a distributed, global team.

Preferred technical and professional experience

Domain & Security Specialized Knowledge

• Identity & Access Management (IAM): Deep understanding of identity-based security, including authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML, LDAP) and authorization patterns (RBAC, ABAC).

• Secrets Management: Familiarity with the lifecycle of secrets, including rotation, dynamic secrets, and encryption-as-a-service.

• Security Personas: Experience designing for "SecOps" and "Platform Engineer" personas, with an ability to balance friction-less developer experience with rigorous security compliance.

Strategic Design & Leadership

• Systems Thinking: Ability to design scalable frameworks and patterns that work across a multi-product ecosystem, ensuring Vault integrates seamlessly with the broader product portfolio.

• Product Strategy: Proven track record of influencing product roadmaps by translating complex technical constraints into strategic user experience opportunities.

• Anticipatory Design: Experience in mapping high-complexity user journeys to identify "edge cases" before they reach engineering, particularly in high-stakes security environments.

• Data-Informed Iteration: Skill in using both qualitative research and quantitative telemetry to justify design decisions and measure the success of released features.

Communication & Execution

• Technical Literacy: Comfort engaging in deep technical discussions with engineers regarding API structures, CLI patterns, and system architecture.

• Visual & Interaction Excellence: A high bar for visual craft and precision, utilizing and contributing back to enterprise-grade design systems (IBM Carbon).