Overview

npm is the world’s largest software repository, with over 10 million users and over 40 billion software package downloads every month. Our systems are critical to software engineers all over the world and used in every industry; from the public registry, which serves packages to open source engineers and small organizations, to our new enterprise solution, which provides single tenant registries for medium and large customers.

What You’ll Do

We’re looking for a Principal UX Designer to join our growing product and UX team, to help define the future of JavaScript development for our massive, global customer base.  We will give you freedom and autonomy to do your best work, with the support and camaraderie you need to enjoy your job. We’re looking for someone who can be a senior individual contributor and an organizational leader today. As we grow, this role will become either a senior mentor or a direct manager of a future UX team.

As a Principal User Experience Designer, you’ll be involved in the full life-cycle of design. You will be a leader on a team of product and UX professionals focused on enabling JavaScript developers – and the companies that employ them – to reduce friction and build amazing things. You will play a principal role in defining the future of our suite of solutions. You will also be part of one or more agile teams as a UX Design lead, working on a daily cadence with product management and engineering to bring our solutions to life.

Key responsibilities

  • Design and lead user research activities – interviews, concept testing, participatory design and usability studies
  • Work with product management to understand business problems and design effective solutions in npm products
  • Support product managers in making clear decisions that promote well-defined, timely, usable releases.
  • Develop prototypes, user workflows, storyboards, wireframes, hi-fidelity mock-ups, design specifications, and detailed design assets.
  • Define, develop and review all user interface as well as usability requirements.
  • Communicate and collaborate with senior stakeholders from across the company, maintaining a trusted relationship with Engineering, UX, Marketing, Sales, Support and executive management.
  • Work directly as part of one or more cross-functional scrum team to communicate and build elegant user interfaces into npm solutions
  • Evolve company design language and standards.
  • Mentor and help build out a UX team

Qualifications

  • 8 or more years of relevant work experience as Sr. UX Designer, Architect and/or Manager
  • Direct experience working at a software product company as a member of agile teams, building, iterating and launching great software products
  • Experience driving user research and usability testing
  • Understanding of design systems, as well as experience leveraging and contributing to design systems
  • Proficiency with industry-standard design and prototyping tools (e.g. Axure, Invision, Sketch, etc.)
  • Experience building prototypes to communicate design concepts to users and project partners
  • Experience in a fast-paced, iterative development environment using agile methodologies

Great to Have

  • You have worked in companies that provide user-focused Enterprise SaaS solutions for developers and/or related technical functions (devops, security, etc.)
  • You have developed software in JavaScript and have used npm for professional or personal projects
  • You love listening to customers to understand their problems and discover what they need
  • You enjoy working directly with product managers and engineers to create terrific user experiences.
  • You get excited by collaborating with a dedicated and professional team to deliver amazing results.
  • You are inspired by thinking on your feet, making both plans and trade-offs.
  • You enjoy solving analytical problems and tracing out edge cases.

Our Code of Conduct

npm exists to facilitate sharing code, by making it easy for JavaScript module developers to publish and distribute packages. npm is a piece of technology, but more importantly, it is a community. We believe that our mission is best served in an environment that is friendly, safe, and accepting; free from intimidation or harassment. We do not tolerate abusive behavior. See our unabridged code of conduct here.

Why You Should Join

In joining the npm team, you’ll become an important part of a small but dedicated engineering team. We strive to provide a sensible working environment that doesn’t ask for or encourage habitual overtime and we offer flexibility in schedule. We have a progressive parental leave policy and vacation time is not just encouraged, but celebrated and enforced. We also understand that healthy schedules lead to better outcomes. To help ensure this balance we have contracted support night coverage so we don’t interrupt anyone’s sleep.

We believe that high-performing teams include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other’s assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we actively seek a diverse pool of applicants, including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, and people from low-income families.

Where We Can Hire

Our headquarters are in Oakland, California. We can best support you if you can overlap with US time zones. We currently have team members across the US time zones and in the UK, Canada, and Mexico. We cannot currently sponsor new work visas, but we can transfer existing H-1Bs.