Lead Product Designer, Atlassian App Foundations and Patterns

Overview

Are you passionate about raising the visual design bar at scale? Do you obsess over craft quality, pixel perfection, and creating UI patterns that not only work well but look and feel exceptional? Are you excited by the opportunity to push visual innovation across the surfaces that millions of Atlassian users see every day? Atlassian is looking for a Lead Product Designer to join the App Foundations and Patterns team — a high-impact, highly visible design team responsible for the core navigation and foundational UX patterns used across all of Atlassian’s products.

This team is accountable for the design of essential surfaces like the App Switcher, Universal Create, Account Switcher, Left Navigation, and emerging patterns like widgets, tables, and preview panels. These foundational elements set the visual tone for how customers experience Atlassian’s portfolio of applications. In this role, you’ll not only raise the bar for craft excellence, but also push creative innovation, finding opportunities to bring delight, clarity, and modern polish to Atlassian Home, Admin, and our core apps.


Working at Atlassian

Atlassians can choose where they work – whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two. That way, Atlassians have more control over supporting their family, personal goals, and other priorities. We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company.

Responsibilities

As Lead Product Designer, you’ll be the key design voice driving visual excellence across these shared surfaces — setting the visual strategy, defining elevated quality bars, and mentoring teams to deliver refined, cohesive designs that feel unmistakably Atlassian. This is a hands-on design leadership role, blending strategic vision with a love for the details, from typography, spacing, grids, and motion to delivering polished, production-ready designs that teams across Atlassian rely on.

You will partner closely with the Head of Product Design for App Foundations and Patterns, Content Design, and Engineering, as well as work across Atlassian’s federated design community, influencing visual standards and ensuring the Atlassian Design System (ADS) evolves with creativity and craft at its core.

• Define the visual design strategy for core app through navigation and foundational patterns across Atlassian apps.

• Set a clear visual quality bar for these patterns and help teams meet that bar through coaching and reviews.

• Lead the visual uplift of foundational surfaces, including the Admin, Home and core apps ensuring they are modern, clear, and consistent.

• Push for creative innovation, finding ways to add delight, motion, and personality into Atlassian’s core surfaces.

• Partner closely with engineering to ensure that design polish is preserved through to final builds.

• Provide hands-on design leadership during key programs like the Nav 4 rollout and Admin refresh.

• Help identify and correct visual drift across products by aligning teams to consistent patterns and visual rules.

• Mentor designers across Atlassian, helping them grow their visual craft and develop sharper design instincts.

• Work with Content Design to ensure visual and content patterns work together for clarity and usability.

• Evolve documentation and design specs, making sure visual guidance is clear, practical, and easy to apply.

• Collaborate with Brand Design to ensure product surfaces reflect Atlassian’s evolving brand expression.

• Use research, audits, and competitive analysis to keep Atlassian’s foundational design language modern and best-in-class.

What We’re Looking For

• 12+ years of product design experience, with a strong focus on visual design and design systems.

• Deep expertise in visual design — including grids, typography, color, motion, and layout — with examples of elevating visual craft at scale.

• Strong track record of pushing creative innovation while maintaining clarity and usability.

• Experience working closely with design systems teams and influencing visual standards across products.

• Proven ability to collaborate with engineering to protect visual quality during implementation.

• Strong skills in coaching and mentoring, helping other designers level up their visual craft.

• Experience designing for responsive, multi-platform products (web, desktop, mobile).

• Comfort balancing hands-on design work with providing clear creative direction.

• Strong communication skills, able to explain visual decisions and build alignment across teams.

• Proficiency with Figma, and ability to create clear, usable design specs and visual guidelines.

• Bonus: Experience improving enterprise software through visual simplification.

Qualifications

Compensation

At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. To support this goal, the baseline of our range is higher than that of the typical market range, but in turn we expect to hire most candidates near this baseline. Base pay within the range is ultimately determined by a candidate's skills, expertise, or experience. In the United States, we have three geographic pay zones. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires in each zone are:

Zone A: $216,500 - $288,700

Zone B: $194,900 - $259,800

Zone C: $179,700 - $239,600

This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.

Please visit go.atlassian.com/payzones for more information on which locations are included in each of our geographic pay zones. However, please confirm the zone for your specific location with your recruiter.

Our perks & benefits

Atlassian offers a variety of perks and benefits to support you, your family and to help you engage with your local community. Our offerings include health coverage, paid volunteer days, wellness resources, and so much more. Visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits to learn more.

About Atlassian

At Atlassian, we're motivated by a common goal: to unleash the potential of every team. Our software products help teams all over the planet and our solutions are designed for all types of work. Team collaboration through our tools makes what may be impossible alone, possible together.

We believe that the unique contributions of all Atlassians create our success. To ensure that our products and culture continue to incorporate everyone's perspectives and experience, we never discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

To provide you the best experience, we can support with accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process. Simply inform our Recruitment team during your conversation with them.

To learn more about our culture and hiring process, visit go.atlassian.com/crh.