Senior Product Designer (UX) - Clearance Required

About this role

ABOUT DEFCON AI

RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF DISRUPTION. DEFCON AI is an insights company that leverages artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering for resilient optimization of complex systems. In today’s dynamically changing world, DEFCON AI’s technology aligns outcomes with operational goals, better decision making, and empowers customers to anticipate assess, and mitigate the impacts of 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 work today is spread across several disconnected legacy systems, and we are replacing it with a single workspace: a prioritized work queue, a unified view that pulls scattered records together, enrichment panels, and dashboards.

Design sits in the product organization here, reporting through the Product Lead alongside product ownership and quality. You will partner daily with product and engineering to define scope, tradeoffs, and priorities, and you will support engineering through implementation rather than handing off and moving on.

This is a discovery-first role. Before anything is built you will interview and observe the people who do this work, map their current process, and design the future one. That becomes an interactive prototype the customer reviews and approves before production code is written, and it is an early program deliverable, so this work starts immediately. Design artifacts on this program are formally reviewed against written criteria, which means your work carries real weight from the first week.

The core design problem is trust. The system recommends what deserves attention and explains why, and your job is to present that so a user can evaluate it rather than simply accept it: showing the supporting evidence, making uncertainty visible, and making disagreement easy. You will work alongside an existing designer and with product, engineering, and data staff.

This is a hands-on role and a senior one. You are here to do the design work, and you will own how design gets done on this program: the research approach, the patterns, and the standard the work is held to. We are building out our design practice and the person in this seat shapes it. This is a fully remote role with occasional travel (up to 25%) to DEFCON AI HQ, customer sites, and vendor facilities as required.

Key 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, and know which constraints are real versus assumed

• 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 so the interface stays coherent as scope grows across releases, and so components carry forward to other products rather than being rebuilt

• 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 rather than waiting to be assigned them

Designing for AI Output

• Present model recommendations, confidence, and supporting evidence so users can evaluate them rather than defer to them

• Make uncertainty and gaps visible, including the case 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 and hand off designs they can build from without guessing, and improve that handoff into a dependable pipeline rather than a recurring negotiation

• Review builds against the design and hold the quality bar through implementation

• Present design rationale clearly enough that stakeholders can follow the reasoning, not only the result

• Iterate 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

• Partner with the existing designer on the team so the two of you cover the program rather than duplicating

• Help establish the design practices we do not have yet: 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

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of product or UX design experience , with a portfolio of shipped, complex applications used by people doing real work every day

• You have owned the design for a system like this before, end to end , from discovery through a shipped interface that users adopted. Please be prepared to discuss which system, what you owned, and how it turned out

• You are the most senior designer in the room and comfortable there. This role sets the design direction rather than executing someone else's, and there is no design leadership above it to escalate to

• You arrive with a method that already works. Design starts immediately on this program, so we are looking for someone who adapts a discovery and delivery approach they have

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