Product Designer (.NET Ecosystem)

Microsoft estimates there are 7M+ monthly active .NET developers worldwide. Our tools – Rider, ReSharper, and various profilers – reach roughly half of them. These users are experts with strong habits and strong opinions. They know exactly how they want to work – which makes them one of the hardest audiences to design for, and one of the most rewarding. Your craft really matters here. We’re looking for a product designer to own end-to-end experiences across the .NET ecosystem. You’ll partner with engineers and product managers who treat design as a strategic input, not a final polish step, and you’ll ship work that developers use every single day. You’ll move across products rather than specializing in one, which means holding complexity in your head and making decisions that work across contexts. You’ll also coordinate with the broader IntelliJ Platform design team – JetBrains builds IDEs across dozens of languages, and ecosystem coherence matters.

What you’ll work on

The .NET ecosystem includes:

• Rider – a cross-platform .NET IDE competing with Visual Studio.

• ReSharper – the Visual Studio extension that started it all.

• Profilers – performance and memory analysis tools (dotTrace and dotMemory).

• VS Code extensions – lightweight tooling for broader reach.

• Cross-product experiences – onboarding, licensing, AI integration, and discoverability.

You’ll work on whatever needs design attention, which shifts based on priorities. Recent examples include: designing an overlay system that gives ReSharper its own identity inside Visual Studio without adding clutter, integrating AI assistance into GameDev workflows where context matters enormously, and making monitoring tools feel like part of the IDE rather than separate expert software.

Expect variety and sophisticated challenges.

What you’ll do:

• Own the design process from early research through shipped pixels –not just the middle part.

• Work across multiple products while maintaining ecosystem coherence.

• Partner with product managers, engineers, and researchers to shape product direction (you’ll have a seat at the table, not just a chair in the corner).

• Conduct and participate in user research: interviews, usability testing, and design validation.

• Build in Figma – fast, organized, with prototypes that actually communicate intent.

• Navigate complex technical domains and translate them into clear, usable experiences.

• Contribute to design system, and pattern documentation.

• Present and defend your design decisions to stakeholders and leadership.

We’ll be happy to have you on our team if you have:

• Strong product design craft: You can take on a problem from research through to delivering a polished UX, and you sweat the details others miss.

• Figma fluency: You’re fast, your files are organized, and you can build prototypes complex enough to test real interactions.

• Comfort with technical complexity: You’re willing to design for domains you don’t fully understand yet, and you learn quickly.

• Systems thinking: You can hold multiple products in your head and design for ecosystem coherence, not just individual screens.

• Independence: You drive projects forward without waiting for direction.

• Research capability: You can run user interviews, synthesize findings, and turn them into design decisions.

• Basic coding literacy: You don’t need to ship production code, but you’ve written enough to know what a breakpoint is, why a build might fail, and what developers actually experience when they work.

• Clear communication: You can explain your reasoning to engineers, PMs, and leadership – and you can push back when needed.

We’d be especially excited if you also have:

• A developer background or engineering mindset: you understand how software gets built.

• Experience designing developer tools, technical products, or complex professional software.

• Opinions about how IDEs should work, backed by actual usage.