Senior Product Designer (UX) - Clearance Required

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 run before rather than assembling one here

Demonstrated experience designing data-dense, workflow-heavy interfaces: role-based views, dashboards, data visualization, queues, and case or record views. This is enterprise software for people with layered permissions and real consequences, not marketing sites or consumer apps

Strong visual craft: layout, hierarchy, and typography, at a fidelity a stakeholder can review and approve

Direct user research experience. You have interviewed and observed real users and turned that into design decisions, not just collected feedback on finished work

Ability to turn an ambiguous problem into a clear, usable solution , and to balance user needs against business goals and technical constraints

Strong prototyping ability in Figma or equivalent

Information architecture and design-system thinking: you structure complex information so it is navigable, and you build reusable components rather than one-off screens

Comfort designing for expert users whose domain you do not know at the start, and the discipline to learn the domain rather than guess at it

Comfort working with subject-matter experts whose time is limited , and the ability to get what you need from a short session

Accessibility fluency: Section 508 and WCAG as normal practice

Comfortable working without an established design practice around you , and willing to help build one

Hands-on. You do the design work. This is not a design management role

Comfortable in a cross-functional agile product team

US Citizenship Required

Active US Top Secret clearance. Discovery and design work happens with users inside a controlled government environment and requires CAC eligibility from the start. This is a current-clearance requirement, not a sponsorship opportunity

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 watching them do it

An interface that holds up under a full workload, not only 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

What We Offer: 

A fully remote, results-based environment

Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package

100% employer paid, comprehensive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family

Unlimited PTO, with your manager’s approval

Flexible work environment where you manage your work day

14 weeks of fully-paid parental leave

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

  We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability. 

Applicant Data Disclosure    

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Defcon AI uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:   

Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;  

Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;  

Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories.  

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact   recruiting@defconai.com .    

Defcon AI requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Defcon AI's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and   Applicant Privacy Notice .