UI/UX Designer/Engineer

Altamira Technologies has a long and successful history providing innovative solutions throughout the U.S. National Security community. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Altamira serves the defense, intelligence, and homeland security communities by focusing on creating innovative solutions leveraging common standards in architecture, data, and security.

About the role

Altamira is growing our UX team to refine our UX processes for user-focused applications, improving our customer’s user experience. This position offers fast-paced, real-world experience in software development for military and government customers. The core goal is to design intuitive and effective user interfaces and workflows by properly executing UX methodologies. Our customer’s requirements are deeply technical and complex, requiring candidates with software development experience, customer interaction experience, and UX experience. Challenges include limited access to users and their current tools, as well as motivations that differ from commercial domains. Applicants with examples of work have an advantage. We use Windows and Linux environments for development; working knowledge of both is a plus. Introduction of new tools and techniques is welcomed.

Responsibilities

• Gather, interpret, and validate understanding of user and customer requirements
• Break down, frame, and analyze the problems to be solved
• Work in collaboration with development teams to clarify and ensure team understanding of each problem and solution
• Design user interface and interactivity solutions
• Effectively communicate design specifications to graphic designers and developers through sketches, low-fidelity/notional wireframes, etc.
• Document work, findings, artifacts, etc.
• Work closely with development leads to synchronize and integrate UX and design cycles into their feature development iterations
• Monitor and communicate new industry UX and design practices

Requirements

• Knowledge of UX processes and mindset to gather requirements, analyze a problem, solve that problem abstractly, and translate into a user interface design
• Ability to build an abstract model (mind maps, cognitive models, flow diagrams, etc.)
• Ability to create rough and notional user interface designs (sketches, low-fidelity mockups, wireframes, etc.) that can be communicated to graphic designers and developers for implementation
• Strong and effective communication skills
• Assertive mindset to advocate for user needs while understanding practical compromises that need to be made to keep project development moving forward

Qualifications

We understand that a good UX professional may come from a broad range of disciplines. It's important that you can convey your experience in UX and how you got to where you are.

Preferably a 4-year degree in any of the following fields or related disciplines:

• User Experience Design
• User Interface Design
• Interaction Design
• Software Development
• Human Factors
• Cognitive Systems
• Engineering Psychology
• Human Computer Interaction