Job description
Octopus Deploy sets the standard for Continuous Delivery, empowering software teams to deliver value in an agile way. Over 4,000 organizations globally – including Ubisoft, Xero, Stack Overflow, NASA, and Disney – rely on our Continuous Delivery, GitOps, and release orchestration solutions.
We’re a profitable scale-up of 300+ people, growing steadily. We’ve built a high-trust, remote-first, and value-driven culture where people are given space to do their best work.
We’re looking for a Design Director to lead the evolution of Octopus’ product growth experience, shaping how new and existing customers discover value, learn Octopus’ core concepts, and grow with our platform. This role sits at the intersection of product-led growth and design leadership: you’ll operate as a player-coach guiding a small team of designers, define the vision for onboarding, activation, adoption, and renewals, and connect design quality directly to business impact.
Why this job is exciting
- You’ll define how thousands of engineers experience Octopus for the first time, setting the tone for confidence, clarity, and delight from day one.
- Lead the design vision for onboarding, activation, and adoption across the Octopus platform, helping us connect product experience directly to revenue growth.
- Represent Product Design in the Product Growth Leadership Team, partnering with Product and Engineering partners to align strategy and execution.
- Build and mentor a small but mighty team of Product Designers, introducing the rituals and practices that drive quality and growth.
- You’ll have autonomy, visibility, and the opportunity to shape one of Octopus’ most critical growth levers as we prepare for our next chapter.
- Serve as a visible design leader across R&D and the company, advocating for customers during their most critical evaluation journeys and building alignment between Product, Engineering, Design, Sales, Marketing, and Customer teams.
- You’ll have autonomy, impact, and the chance to help set the standard for how Octopus serves our largest, most complex customers.
What you’ll do
- Develop a clear experience vision for customer onboarding, activation, adoption, and renewals, balancing fast paths to value with deep educational moments.
- Champion design for both Free and Enterprise tiers, ensuring frictionless evaluation, guided learning, and meaningful activation journeys.
- Lead product design across the Product Growth domain, supporting and developing a growing team of Product Designers.
- Act as a player-coach, working closely with your team while shaping the broader design strategy, and diving in to work in the details on specific initiatives.
- Build an opinionated view on how we onboard and educate customers through our product experience, contributing this perspective across Octopus Design to improve how we educate customers on new concepts, features & mental models.
- Establish experimentation guardrails for the customer experience that balance rapid learning with user trust and continuity.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, and Marketing peers to connect experience design to revenue metrics, identifying levers that drive conversion, retention, and expansion.
- Represent design in the Product Growth leadership group, bringing the voice of the customer and the bar for quality into business and strategy discussions.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing to ensure onboarding, education, and renewals form a coherent, connected experience.
- Inspire through storytelling, crafting narratives that link design, learning, and customer success to business outcomes.
We’re looking for someone like you who
- Has 12+ years of product design experience, including leadership within product-led or SaaS growth environments.
- Brings a strong toolkit as a design practitioner, with skills in journey mapping, vision casting, prototyping, customer research & other sense-making artefacts that articulate our customer experience.
- Has shaped experiences for onboarding, activation, or lifecycle journeys, ideally in complex, technical or developer-facing products.
- Understands how to balance experience excellence with commercial outcomes, translating design improvements into measurable business impact.
- Brings a systems mindset, connecting product education, marketing, and in-product experiences into a unified growth loop.
- Thrives in cross-functional spaces, aligning execs, peers, and teams across Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Sales.
- Has proven experience mentoring and growing designers, fostering both craft excellence and strategic thinking.
- Communicates with clarity, influence, and storytelling, connecting day-to-day design decisions to the bigger vision.
Compensation
Octopus has an internally open and transparent system for compensation. Any Octonaut can view the compensation for any role at any level. This ensures people doing the same work with the same skill get paid the same.
The compensation for this role is:
Level 5 (Assoc. Design Director): Maturing: $190k AUD / $205k NZD, Performing: $200k AUD / $215k NZD
Salaries exclude Super and KiwiSaver.
Benefits include a minimum of 25 days annual leave, up to 10 days of paid sick and carers leave, 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave with flexible return options, and stock options. Learn more.
Interview Process
Below is the interview process you can expect for this role. We know interviewing can seem daunting, but rest assured we designed our interview process to move quickly while still getting you all the information you need.
👋 Initial chat
[30 min] Meet a Talent Acquisition team member, where you’ll learn more about life at Octopus and the role. We’ll give you a glimpse into the organization structure and how we work.
☕ Hiring manager interview
[60 Min] Meet our VP, Product Design, to explore your experience, the shape of the role and the problems we’re hoping to solve together, and how your skills might complement our mission.
🧑💻Team interview
[90 min] Present a case study of a strategic design initiative that you’ve led. You’ll present to a panel of Design, Product, and Engineering members that you’ll work with.
🤩 Design leadership approach
[60 Min] Meet a few of our Design leaders to discuss your leadership style, how you lead your team, and learn more about leadership at Octopus.
Our public employee handbook is the best place to learn more about life at Octopus. It includes our values, how we structure teams, career progression, leave and benefits, and much more.
If you’re enthusiastic about this position, even if you don’t meet all the criteria above, we wholeheartedly encourage you to submit your application. Our talent team is in-house, and we recognize that every individual brings something unique. We take the time to review every application and consider how you might add to the team.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
