The posting
A career in IBM Software means you’ll be part of a team that transforms our customers’ challenges into industry-leading solutions. We are an infinitely curious team, always seeking new possibilities and dedicated to creating the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native software solutions. Our renowned legacy creates endless global opportunities for our network of IBMers. We are a team of deep product experts, ensuring exceptional client experiences, with a focus on delivery, excellence and obsession over customer outcomes. This position involves contributing to HashiCorp’s offerings, now part of IBM, which empower organizations to automate and secure multi-cloud and hybrid environments. You will join a team managing the lifecycle of infrastructure and security, enhancing IBM’s cloud solutions to ensure enterprises achieve efficiency, security and scalability in their cloud journey.
About Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) & Terraform
IBM’s Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) Design Team builds the Infrastructure Cloud, enabling modern enterprises to take a unified approach across the build, deploy, and manage phases of their infrastructure journey. Our design team creates workflows that dramatically ease the complexity and operational overhead of multi-cloud environments, allowing practitioners and platform teams to focus on high-value innovation rather than repetitive manual tasks. Guided by our core principles of Kindness, Humility, and Reflection, we design with the user at heart and our 'beauty works better' ethos in hand.
At the core of ILM is Terraform, the industry-standard Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform that empowers organizations to provision and manage any cloud, on-premises, or edge infrastructure.
You will influence platform and business strategy by linking design initiatives directly to leading usage metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), implementing scalable design frameworks, and driving executive alignment across Product Management, Engineering, and Field leadership. You can expect to:
- Oversee Strategic Research & User Understanding: Lead research initiatives across interconnected products, synthesizing generative insights and telemetry analytics to define comprehensive, user-centered experience strategies that shape platform direction.
- Pioneer AI Innovation at Scale: Drive cross-disciplinary adoption of AI-powered design workflows and lead the architectural definition of next-generation AI capabilities embedded directly into Terraform and ILM developer experiences.
- Architect Multi-Product Workflows: Solve high-impact product areas spanning Web, CLI, VCS, and APIs that bridge across multiple squad boundaries, turning intricate multi-cloud infrastructure patterns into intuitive, unified developer journeys.
- Influence Business & Platform Strategy: Partner with product and engineering leaders to establish product roadmaps, implement scalable prioritization frameworks, and measure business impact using leading revenue and adoption indicators.
- Lead Design Systems & Technical Rigor: Drive comprehensive adoption and evolution of design systems (Helios and Carbon), setting accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA) and ensuring technical excellence across graphical and terminal interfaces.
- Cultivate Talent & Community Leadership: Lead Communities of Practice (CoPs), mentor senior and early-career designers, facilitate high-impact design thinking workshops, and foster a culture of open reflection, psychological safety, and bold experimentation.
- 10+ years of professional enterprise Product Design experience, with at least 5–7+ years specifically dedicated to developer experience (DevEx), cloud infrastructure, developer platforms (IDPs), DevOps tooling, or highly technical enterprise SaaS.
- Multi-interface architectural mastery: Proven track record architecting cohesive user journeys that span across disparate touchpoints: graphical web consoles (GUI), terminal/command-line tools (CLI), version control systems (GitOps/VCS), and programmatic APIs.
- Recognized AI design leadership: Demonstrated expertise in pioneering AI-augmented product features (e.g., generative configuration, automated drift analysis, contextual AI copilots) and driving team-wide adoption of AI tools and methodologies in the design process.
- Cross-product & platform scope: Experience defining design strategy and scalable UX frameworks across multiple interconnected squads and product lines (e.g., tying provisioning to image governance and developer self-service).
- Executive storytelling & strategic alignment: Exceptional ability to translate complex technical constraints and customer telemetry into compelling strategic narratives that influence Product Directors, VP-level engineering leaders, and go-to-market executives.
- Strategic trade-off & outcome management: Track record of linking design investments directly to leading business metrics (product adoption, expansion, task completion rate, retention) and making courageous prioritization decisions.
- Mentorship & Community of Practice (CoP) leadership: Proven history of leading design critique, establishing design standards, mentoring senior/lead designers, and fostering a psychologically safe, high-trust team culture.
- Hands-on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) knowledge: Working knowledge or hands-on experience with Terraform (.tf syntax, state files, providers), Packer, Kubernetes, or container orchestration.
- Design system architecture & contribution: Experience contributing to or defining core architectures for multi-product design systems (e.g., Carbon, Helios), including design tokens, dark mode/theming, and developer handoff tooling.
- Code-level prototyping & technical fluency: Ability to build high-fidelity interactive prototypes with code or script automated design workflows.
- Industry presence & thought leadership: Public speaking, published articles, patents, or active contributions to the DevEx, open-source, or enterprise design communities.
