Staff Product Designer

As a Staff Product Designer at Walrus Foundation, you'll define and own the product experience for the Walrus Protocol, a Verifiable Data Platform for AI Builders. You'll partner closely with product and engineering from discovery through implementation, helping determine which problems matter, investigating how developers actually work, and ultimately defining how developers experience Walrus. This role goes beyond executing finished requirements-you'll challenge assumptions, prototype solutions, and establish the design systems and standards that allow the product to scale.

What you'll do

• Own the Walrus product experience end to end, defining and evolving the developer experience across Walrus's product surfaces and key workflows.
• Lead discovery with product and engineering by framing problems before the team jumps to solutions, identifying unanswered questions, and determining what evidence is needed before committing to build.
• Bring developers directly into the design process through lightweight interviews and usability tests, putting prototypes in front of real users and synthesizing findings into decisions the team can act on.
• Design complex technical workflows including flows, wireframes, prototypes, and production-ready designs for experiences involving dense data, system state, configuration, resource management, and high-consequence actions.
• Influence product direction by bringing a strong point of view on what Walrus should build and constructively challenging product and engineering assumptions when needed.
• Build Walrus's design system by establishing and maintaining shared components, interaction patterns, and product principles that create consistency and allow the product surface to grow without fragmenting.
• Benchmark the market regularly by tearing down comparable developer and infrastructure products to understand established patterns and identify opportunities.
• Stay close through implementation by partnering with engineering throughout development, reviewing what ships against the intended experience, and catching problems early.
• Raise the design bar by establishing what excellent developer-product design looks like for Walrus and helping create the practices that maintain that standard as the organization grows.

What you bring

• 8-10 years of product design experience with demonstrated ownership of complex technical products.
• A portfolio demonstrating ownership of shipped developer tools, cloud/infrastructure products, consoles, dashboards, or similarly complex technical products.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify technically sophisticated workflows without removing the control or information expert users need.
• Strong interaction-design skills across data-heavy interfaces, tables, configuration, complex states, progressive disclosure, permissions, errors, and high-consequence actions.
• Experience independently identifying and framing product problems rather than primarily executing against predefined requirements.
• A track record of influencing product strategy and roadmap decisions through design.
• Strong qualitative research instincts and experience incorporating lightweight user research and usability testing into day-to-day product work.
• Experience creating or significantly evolving design systems and reusable interaction patterns.
• Strong partnership with engineering and willingness to remain involved through implementation and design QA.
• Excellent communication skills and confidence to disagree constructively with senior product and engineering partners.
• Comfort operating with significant autonomy in an ambiguous, rapidly evolving technical environment.

About Walrus Foundation

Walrus Foundation is building the Walrus Protocol, a Verifiable Data Platform designed to help AI Builders store and manage their data in ways that make it persistent, portable, and under their control across apps, providers, and agents.