Principal Designer Jobs in Washington

Are you a designer who makes to decide, who pressure-tests ideas by building them, not just speccing them? AWS is looking for a Principal Product Designer to define and own the design vision for observability — the products engineers and SREs rely on to understand, monitor, and operate systems at massive scale. In this role you'll turn ambiguous, deeply technical problems into clear design theses and simple, shippable experiences across dense data: dashboards, telemetry, alerting, and incident workflows. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering in the codebase, set the craft bar for the team, and coach senior designers to raise theirs. If you thrive on problems others haven't framed yet, build your way to the answer, and want your work to shape product strategy at scale, we'd love to hear from you.

Key job responsibilities

• Define the design vision and quality bar for your product area, translating business goals and competitive signals into clear, actionable design direction that aligns teams across the organization.
• Lead the design of complex, multi-surface experiences — including emerging platforms and AI-powered interactions — ensuring usability, accessibility, and coherence at every touchpoint.
• Partner with engineering, product management, legal, accessibility, and data science teams to navigate trade-offs between long-term customer needs, technical feasibility, and business priorities.
• Develop and evangelize scalable design systems and frameworks that raise consistency and craft standards across product surfaces, mentoring senior designers along the way.
• Communicate design strategy and rationale to executive audiences through compelling narratives that connect user experience outcomes to measurable business impact.

A day in the life
Your morning might start in a design review where you challenge the team to push past the surface of a new alerting experience, followed by a working session with engineering to pressure-test what's technically possible. You're not waiting for a PM to write the brief; you're shaping the problem. After lunch, you're committing a refined dashboard pattern directly to the codebase. Later, you pair with a senior designer on an incident-triage flow, coaching them through complex trade-offs rather than taking the pen. Throughout it all, you bring clarity to ambiguity and help your organization move forward with confidence.

About the team
Our team shapes the observability experiences that engineers and SREs depend on to run systems at scale turning overwhelming streams of telemetry, logs, and alerts into something people can actually reason about under pressure. We operate as a builder team: we don't hand off specs and wait. We prototype, commit production code, run experiments, and push toward production, working side by side with engineering in shared pods. We're investing in emerging technology including AI-driven and agentic experiences for monitoring and incident response and we care as much about the craft of a dense data interface as the strategy behind it. If you want to build the future of how people operate complex systems, this is the team to join.