UX Design Lead

About the role

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a UX Design Lead based in the United States. This role will own the end-to-end user experience of a sophisticated platform serving complex government and mission-critical environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end user experience, from initial access and onboarding through application deployment and ongoing platform usage.
• Analyze technical and operational processes to identify unnecessary steps, manual dependencies, user friction, and opportunities for simplification or automation.
• Design intuitive workflows for complex capabilities including identity and access management, access control, role-based access control, provisioning, application onboarding, environment selection, and compliance requirements.
• Partner closely with software engineers, cybersecurity specialists, product managers, and technical leaders to ensure experiences are technically viable and aligned with platform constraints.
• Facilitate stakeholder discussions, resolve competing priorities, and build alignment when process improvements require organizational or technical changes.
• Translate complex technical requirements into user journeys, process flows, wireframes, prototypes, high-fidelity designs, and implementation-ready specifications.
• Establish and maintain consistent UX patterns, reusable components, design standards, design tokens, and documentation across the platform.
• Conduct user research, stakeholder interviews, and usability testing with internal and external users to validate assumptions and continuously improve workflows.
• Provide front-end engineering teams with clear design specifications and assets that reduce ambiguity and accelerate implementation.
• Use AI-assisted tools where appropriate to accelerate research, validate workflows, stress-test designs, develop requirements, and create narrowly scoped implementation assets.
• Contribute limited front-end artifacts, such as CSS variables, design tokens, component specifications, or similar low-risk assets, when they can materially accelerate delivery.
• Ensure digital experiences meet accessibility requirements and applicable Section 508 standards.
• Advocate for user needs while balancing security, compliance, technical feasibility, maintainability, and mission requirements.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in UX design, product design, service design, or a related discipline, with a track record of leading complex end-to-end design initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience improving workflows where challenges involve business processes, technical constraints, organizational behaviors, or system architecture rather than visual design alone.
• Experience designing complex enterprise, SaaS, PaaS, developer, cybersecurity, or other technically sophisticated products.
• Strong proficiency in creating user flows, journey maps, process diagrams, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs.
• Proven ability to work directly with software engineers and technical stakeholders to translate design concepts into implementation-ready requirements.
• Working knowledge of modern web technologies, including HTML, CSS, responsive design, APIs, and component-based front-end development.
• Experience developing or maintaining design systems, reusable components, design tokens, or comparable UX standards.
• Experience conducting user research, usability testing, and stakeholder interviews.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain design decisions, tradeoffs, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to investigate ambiguity, identify root causes, and independently drive decisions.
• Able to balance user experience objectives with security, compliance, technical feasibility, and operational requirements.
• U.S. citizenship is required.
• Able to obtain and maintain the security clearance or access required to support government customers.

Benefits

Target annual salary range of $123,000 – $170,000. Remote position available within the United States. Opportunity to shape the UX direction of an emerging platform as an early member of a small, cross-functional team. Significant exposure to product, engineering, cybersecurity, and technical leadership. Opportunity to work on complex, mission-critical technology and improve experiences for sophisticated enterprise and government users. Collaborative environment focused on innovation, technical excellence, and meaningful mission impact. Compensation is determined based on factors including location, internal equity, business considerations, contract requirements, education, experience, skills, and security clearances.