Manager, Product Design: Application Observability

Your opportunity

New Relic is hiring an on-site design manager for our Hyderabad team, leading design for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Log Management — two of the platform's most used products. APM gives engineering teams full-stack visibility across their applications: connecting traces, metrics, and infrastructure data so they can find what's breaking and understand why. Log Management is where engineers go to make sense of raw data at scale — ingesting, parsing, and querying log data across their entire stack, without the operational overhead of managing it separately. These are the products engineers open when something is on fire, which means the design work is high-stakes and high-visibility.

This is an on-site role in Hyderabad. Many of the engineers and product managers you'll partner with are there too, and being present — in standups, reviews, and the quick conversations before a decision gets made — is part of how you'll build the relationships that make design effective. You'll also work closely with design, product, and engineering partners in the US and Spain, so operating across time zones and communicating well in writing are part of the job, not an afterthought.

You'll manage a small team of designers, own the quality of design work across APM and Logs, and stay close enough to the craft to contribute directly when it matters. If you've led a small design team on complex technical products and want clear ownership of both the work and the people — this is that role.

What you'll do

• Manage and develop your designers — run consistent 1:1s including regular career development conversations, give direct and specific feedback, set clear expectations for each person, and invest in their growth. Build a team culture where people feel they belong and different perspectives are welcome. You'll represent your team in calibration conversations and advocate for their work and careers within the broader design org.
• Own design quality across APM and Logs — review work critically, raise problems before they reach partners, and make sure the team is solving the right problems at the right level of craft. You're accountable for what ships.
• Keep the user's perspective in the conversation — design managers at New Relic are the voice of the user in product and engineering discussions. You bring user needs and research insights into roadmap conversations, not just design reviews.
• Partner with PM and Engineering — work with your product and engineering counterparts as a peer. Hold the design perspective, push back when the direction needs it, and communicate design's value in terms of outcomes the business tracks: adoption, retention, time to value.
• Keep the team focused and on track — manage incoming work, maintain visibility into what's in flight, help the team balance competing priorities, and set clear expectations with PM and Engineering partners about what's possible and when.
• Help your team use AI well — stay curious about tools like Figma AI, Claude, and Gemini and how they can help your designers work better: faster exploration, smarter prototyping, better research synthesis. You don't need to be an expert, but you're not slowing down experimentation either.
• Contribute IC design work when the work calls for it — you're an experienced designer, and there are moments where the team needs your hands on a problem. Roll up your sleeves when it's the right call; delegate when it isn't.
• Hire well — contribute to recruiting when the team has open roles. Use each hire to bring in diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and build the kind of team where different viewpoints make the work better.
• Connect Hyderabad to the rest of the design org — bridge your team to design, product, and engineering partners in the US and Spain. Apply New Relic's design standards and practices locally, and make sure your team isn't working in isolation from the broader design org direction.

This role requires

• 8+ years of product design experience, with meaningful time on technically complex B2B or enterprise software — products with data-dense interfaces, technical users, and real stakes in production
• 2–4 years of direct people management — you've run 1:1s, given honest performance feedback, and developed designers at different career stages
• Experience working across time zones — comfortable with async communication and able to build real working relationships with partners you won't always be in the same room as
• A clear design point of view and the confidence to use it — you can evaluate work, give specific feedback, and hold a position with a PM or engineering partner who pushes back
• Strong written and verbal communication in English — this is a distributed org and clear communication is how work stays connected across it
• A portfolio showing your design process and how you reason through hard problems — not just finished screens, but how you think and what tradeoffs you made

Bonus points if you have

• Experience with APM, log management, observability, or similar developer-facing infrastructure products
• Familiarity with design systems and when to work within them vs. when to push on them
• Experience hiring and growing a design team over time, not just managing a steady state
• Hands-on curiosity with AI tools — Figma AI, Claude, Gemini, and others — in your own workflow or helping your team adopt them
• Comfort prototyping with code or code-adjacent tools — Cursor, v0, Replit, or similar