Senior Product Designer (UX) - Clearance Required

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in healthcare, cyber, and national security. DEFCON AI, a Red Cell company, is an insights company leveraging AI, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering to optimize complex systems for resilience against disruption.

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. You will replace disconnected legacy systems with a unified workspace featuring a prioritized work queue, unified record view, enrichment panels, and dashboards. This is a discovery-first role where you will interview users, map current processes, and design future workflows before any code is written. Your work will be formally reviewed against written criteria, carrying real weight from the first week.

The core design challenge is building trust in AI recommendations by presenting supporting evidence, making uncertainty visible, and enabling easy disagreement. You will partner daily with product and engineering teams, supporting implementation rather than handing off designs. This is a hands-on, senior role where you will shape how design is executed on this program and help build the design practice at DEFCON AI.

This is a fully remote role with occasional travel (up to 25%) to DEFCON AI HQ, customer sites, and vendor facilities as required.

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 that hold up to review by the people who do the work
  • Translate mission and operational needs into interaction designs, distinguishing real constraints from assumed ones
  • 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 products
  • Design for high-volume, repetitive work: keyboard efficiency, scannability, minimal context switching, and low error rates under time pressure
  • Design accessible interfaces that meet Section 508 and WCAG requirements
  • Identify gaps in the existing experience and propose improvements proactively
• Designing for AI Output
  • Present model recommendations, confidence, 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 the review and override path so disagreeing with the system is easy and the reason is captured
  • Design audit and traceability views so any conclusion can be traced back to its 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 guessing
  • Review builds against the design and maintain quality through implementation
  • Present design rationale clearly so stakeholders can follow the reasoning
  • 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
  • Help establish design practices: repeatable research habits, reusable patterns, and a cleaner handoff to front-end engineering
  • Raise the work of designers around you 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
• Experience owning the design of a similar system end-to-end, from discovery through a shipped interface that users adopted
• Comfort as the most senior designer in the room, setting design direction rather than executing someone else's
• A proven discovery and delivery method that can be adapted immediately
• Demonstrated experience designing data-dense, workflow-heavy interfaces: role-based views, dashboards, data visualization, queues, and case or record views
• Strong visual craft: layout, hierarchy, and typography at a fidelity stakeholders can review and approve
• Direct user research experience: interviewing and observing real users to inform design decisions
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear, usable solutions while balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints
• Strong prototyping ability in Figma or equivalent
• Information architecture and design-system thinking: 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 who have limited time
• Accessibility fluency: 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 design management role
• US Citizenship required
• Active US Top Secret clearance required (current clearance, not sponsorship)
• Willingness to travel up to 25% to customer sites, DEFCON AI HQ, and vendor facilities as required

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for government users, including work inside controlled environments
• Experience designing review-queue, triage, or high-volume workflow interfaces
• Experience designing interfaces that present AI or model output, including explainability, confidence, and human review patterns
• Experience with government accessibility review and remediation
• Experience running design work on a fixed-deliverable schedule with formal customer acceptance
• Front-end fluency (HTML, CSS, React) sufficient to work 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 who recognize their own work in the design because it came from observing them
• An interface that holds up under a full workload, not just in a demo
• Model output presented so users can tell when to trust it and when to push back
• Work that ships with minimal rework
• Design capacity that no longer depends on any one person

Benefits

• Fully remote, results-based environment
• Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package
• 100% employer-paid comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, and 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
• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement
• Paid maternity and paternity leave for 14 weeks at normal pay
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives
• Mental health benefits through Tara Mind
• Cost-effective GLP-1 solutions through Crux

Pay

Salary Range: $180,000–$215,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.