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Salary: USD 118,150 - 159,850 / annual
Defense Unicorns is seeking a Product Designer to help shape the user experience of UDS Enterprise, a platform that securely deploys and manages mission applications at enterprise scale across multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers.
In this role, you will focus initially on helping mission users discover approved tools and request access through an intuitive self-service workspace. Over time, the scope will expand to encompass the full software deployment workflow, including interactions with SREs and administrators who configure tools and manage access.
You will partner closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and customer-facing teams to create an integrated UDS experience that makes complex software delivery and administration feel approachable and low-risk for users who may not be deep Kubernetes or SaaS administration experts, while preserving the control, security, and technical accuracy large organizations require.
Key responsibilities include:
- Collaborating with cross-functional teams to conceptualize, prototype, test, and refine user-centered solutions
- Conducting comprehensive UX research and testing to gather user feedback and identify pain points
- Defining early product concepts, high-level workflows, micro-interactions, and visual design for enterprise experiences
- Creating and maintaining user personas for enterprise users across product teams and stakeholders
- Designing intuitive enterprise experiences that help scale mission value
- Creating user flows, journeys, and other UX/UI design artifacts
- Planning iterative UI improvements that enhance the enterprise user experience
- Developing deep understanding of disconnected operations, classification boundaries, and DoD operational constraints
- Documenting UI solutions and contributing to shared component libraries
- Ensuring seamless cross-product integration with other UDS platform tools
- Building working knowledge of UDS, DevSecOps, IDAM, and highly regulated environments
REQUIREMENTS:
Portfolio Requirement: Candidates must demonstrate proven product design experience for enterprise software with examples including: complex enterprise workflows with multiple user roles, organizations, tenants, catalogs, or workspaces; self-service product experiences where users request access to resources/tools; simplified complex workflows without hiding important constraints; systems thinking across workflows, not just isolated screens.
Core Design Capabilities:
- 3-5 years of product design experience, with at least 1-2 years designing enterprise software or complex B2B SaaS products
- Experience designing products that support enterprise self-service, multi-tenancy, centrally managed administration, or organization-level governance
- Solid proficiency across systems design, UX/interaction design, and visual design
- Proficiency in Figma, including component libraries, auto-layout, variables, prototyping, responsive design techniques, and developer handoff
- Understanding of accessibility fundamentals and knowledge of 508 compliance
- Ability to explore multiple solutions, identify tradeoffs, and articulate clear UX rationale
- Experience facilitating design critiques, remote user testing sessions, and collaborative design sessions
Enterprise Platform Experience:
- Experience designing for enterprise users, service members, administrators, SREs, IT teams, platform teams, security teams, or similarly complex user groups
- Experience designing workflows where users discover, compare, request, access, or manage tools, applications, services, permissions, subscriptions, or policies
- Comfort working through complex information architecture, data-heavy interfaces, system state, auditability, and user permissions
- Ability to create simple UX flows that help users understand security, access, status, and next steps without creating unnecessary friction
Technical and Domain Knowledge:
- Familiarity with Tailwind CSS utility-first approach and constraints, enough to have informed conversations with engineers about feasibility and implementation
- Basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts or willingness to learn, including clusters, namespaces, workloads, deployments, and platform operations
- Familiarity with identity and access management concepts such as SSO, RBAC, groups, permissions, organizations, tenants, and user provisioning
- Comfort learning technical domains and asking good questions when context is unclear
Work Style and Communication:
- Excellent visual, verbal, and written communication skills with the ability to articulate design decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Ability to make complex workflows clear and concise in writing, prototypes, and diagrams
- Proven ability to work autonomously, know when to ask for help, and actively resolve dependencies
- Comfort working in ambiguous problem spaces and turning vague requirements into concrete designs
- Experience working remote/asynchronously with distributed teams across time zones
- Strong growth mindset and curiosity about technology, customers, and the mission
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience designing SaaS management, service catalog, internal developer portal, marketplace, app store, or enterprise administration tools such as Google Workspace Admin, 1Password Business, Jamf, Okta, Keycloak, AWS, Azure, GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, Backstage, or ServiceNow
- Experience with Kubernetes, DevSecOps, developer platforms, infrastructure management, security workflows, or cloud administration
- Experience designing identity, SSO, RBAC, organization management, tenant management, entitlement, or access-control workflows
- Previous experience designing for government, defense, or national security
- Experience designing products used by both less technical mission end users and the SREs, platform teams, or technical administrators who support them
- Experience leveraging AI tools to accelerate UX processes without sacrificing quality, judgment, or originality
Note: U.S. citizenship is required as this position is with a contractor for the U.S. government.
