Senior Product Designer (UX) - Clearance Required

DEFCON AI is an insights company leveraging artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering to optimize complex systems for resilience. Our technology aligns outcomes with operational goals, enhances decision-making, and empowers customers to anticipate, assess, and mitigate disruptions.

About the Role

As the Senior Product Designer, you will own complex product experiences from discovery through delivery for a new AI-enabled decision-support system. The current workflow spans several disconnected legacy systems, which we are consolidating into a single workspace featuring a prioritized work queue, unified record view, enrichment panels, and dashboards. Design is embedded within the product organization, reporting to the Product Lead alongside product ownership and quality.

This is a discovery-first role where you will interview and observe end users, map their current processes, and design the future workflow. Your interactive prototype will be reviewed and approved by customers before production code is written, serving as an early program deliverable. The core design challenge is building trust: the system recommends actions and explains reasoning, and your job is to present this so users can evaluate rather than blindly accept it—showing evidence, making uncertainty visible, and facilitating disagreement.

You will collaborate daily with product and engineering teams to define scope, tradeoffs, and priorities, supporting implementation rather than handing off designs. This is a hands-on, senior role where you shape how design is executed on this program, including research approaches, patterns, and standards. The position is fully remote with occasional travel (up to 25%) to DEFCON AI HQ, customer sites, and vendor facilities.

Responsibilities

• Discovery and Workflow Design
  • Run structured discovery with end users: interviews, shadowing sessions, and workflow observation
  • Produce current-state and future-state workflow maps validated by end users
  • Translate mission and operational needs into interaction designs, distinguishing real constraints from assumptions
  • Deliver a fully interactive clickable prototype covering prioritized queues, enrichment panels, record history, and dashboards as an early program deliverable
• Interface and Interaction Design
  • Design the user workspace end-to-end: work queue, unified record view, evidence and enrichment panels, decision flow, record history, trend views, and operational dashboards
  • Apply and contribute to a design system to maintain coherence across releases and reuse components across products
  • Design for high-volume, repetitive work: prioritize keyboard efficiency, scannability, minimal context switching, and low error rates under time pressure
  • Ensure interfaces meet Section 508 and WCAG accessibility requirements
  • Proactively identify gaps in the existing experience and propose improvements
• Designing for AI Output
  • Present model recommendations, confidence levels, and supporting evidence so users can evaluate rather than defer to them
  • Make uncertainty and gaps visible, including cases where the system returns insufficient evidence
  • Design review and override paths to make disagreement easy and capture reasoning
  • Create audit and traceability views to allow tracing conclusions back to source records
• Delivery Partnership
  • Partner closely with product and engineering from problem definition through launch, not just at handoff
  • Work directly with front-end engineers to hand off designs they can build without ambiguity, improving the handoff process
  • Review builds against designs and maintain quality standards through implementation
  • Present design rationale clearly to stakeholders, enabling them to follow the reasoning, not just the result
  • Iterate based on real usage feedback, analytics, and acceptance-testing results across multiple releases
  • Support training and adoption materials as the system rolls out to a wider user cohort
  • Collaborate with the existing designer to cover the program without duplication
  • Establish missing design practices: repeatable research habits, reusable patterns, and a cleaner handoff to front-end engineering
  • Elevate the work of other designers through review and collaboration as the team grows

Requirements

• 8+ years of product or UX design experience, with a portfolio of shipped, complex applications used daily in real work environments
• End-to-end ownership of a similar system, from discovery through shipped interface and user adoption (be prepared to discuss specifics)
• Comfort as the most senior designer in the room, setting design direction without escalation paths
• A proven discovery and delivery method adaptable to immediate program needs
• Experience designing data-dense, workflow-heavy interfaces: role-based views, dashboards, data visualization, queues, and case/record views for enterprise software with layered permissions and real consequences
• Strong visual craft: layout, hierarchy, and typography at a fidelity suitable for stakeholder review and approval
• Direct user research experience: interviewing and observing real users to inform design decisions, not just collecting feedback on finished work
• Ability to transform ambiguous problems into clear, usable solutions while balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints
• Strong prototyping skills in Figma or equivalent tools
• Information architecture and design-system expertise: structuring complex information for navigability and building reusable components
• Comfort designing for expert users in unfamiliar domains, with the discipline to learn rather than guess
• Ability to work effectively with subject-matter experts under time constraints
• Fluency in accessibility standards: Section 508 and WCAG as normal practice
• Comfort working without an established design practice and willingness to help build one
• Hands-on design work; this is not a management role
• US citizenship and active US Top Secret clearance (required from day one; not a sponsorship opportunity)
• Willingness to travel up to 25% to customer sites, DEFCON AI HQ, and vendor facilities

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for government users, including work in controlled environments
• Experience designing review-queue, triage, or high-volume workflow interfaces
• Experience designing interfaces for AI/model output, including explainability, confidence, and human review patterns
• Experience with government accessibility review and remediation
• Experience running design work on fixed-deliverable schedules with formal customer acceptance
• Front-end fluency (HTML, CSS, React) sufficient to collaborate closely with engineers
• Experience with enterprise, regulated, or technically complex products
• Experience contributing to or evolving a design system

What Success Looks Like

• Workflow maps and an interactive prototype accepted by the customer on schedule, early in the program
• Users recognizing their own work in the design because it reflects their observed processes
• An interface that performs under full workload, not just in demos
• Model output presented so users can discern when to trust it and when to challenge it
• Work that ships with minimal rework
• Design capacity that no longer depends on any single individual

Benefits

• Fully remote, results-based environment
• Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package
• 100% employer-paid comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision) for you and your family
• Unlimited PTO, with manager approval
• Flexible work environment where you manage your workday
• 14 weeks of fully-paid parental leave

Pay

Salary Range: $180,000–$215,000, representing the typical range based on experience, skills, and other factors.