UI/UX Lead Developer

Overview of Opportunity 

As a UI/UX Lead Developer, you'll be instrumental in shaping the user experience and interface of our mission-critical system solution. You'll lead the charge in creating intuitive, engaging, and effective UIs that directly support the complex needs of our analysts and operators. Leveraging your expertise in JavaScript frameworks (Angular, React, TypeScript), UI/UX design principles, and user-centered development, you'll guide a small team and contribute directly to exceptional user experiences. This role demands a leader who can translate intricate user needs and evolving requirements into innovative UI/UX solutions, helping to define the future of our intelligence community tool.

What you will do:

Leadership & Collaboration:

• Lead the UI Team: You'll directly lead our small talented UI team, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and fostering a collaborative environment. Your leadership will help build designs that prioritize user engagement and satisfaction.You will also act as the lead for user engagement.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Meet regularly with program leadership and management to discuss project status, roadmaps, and strategic UI/UX initiatives, ensuring a unified vision for user engagement across the product.
• Cross-functional Partnership: Work closely with the Data and Analytics SME, Solution Architect, and Product Manager to define and refine features, ensuring UI/UX aligns with data capabilities and architectural vision, all with an eye toward improving the user journey.
• Requirements Definition: Collaborate directly with Product to help define and refine requirements for UI features, translating high-level concepts into actionable design and development tasks that enhance user interaction.
• Deep User Collaboration & Engagement: Proactively engage directly with users to understand their workflows, pain points, and preferences. You'll gather feedback to continuously refine designs and validate solutions, ensuring the UI is meeting the mission needs efficiently and effectively.
• Jira Management: Assist with the creation and ongoing management of Jira content, workflows, and boards to streamline UI/UX team tasks and project tracking, ensuring user-centric tasks are prioritized.

Design & Prototyping:

• Oversee Design Excellence: Take ownership of the software, visual, and UX design, ensuring consistency, usability, and aesthetic appeal across the application. Your focus will be on creating interfaces that are not only efficient but also intuitive and visually appealing.
• Standard & Rule Development: Develop and enforce UI/UX standards, design rules, and style guides to ensure a cohesive and high-quality user experience that promotes ease of use and familiarity.
• Prototyping & Mock-ups: Lead the creation of interactive prototypes and mock-ups to visualize design concepts, gather early user feedback, and iterate quickly, ensuring designs are tested and validated by potential users before full development.
• Future Concept Development: Spearhead the development of future UI/UX concepts for the tool, anticipating user needs and technological advancements to keep our interface at the cutting edge of user engagement.

Development & Refinement:

• Process Flow Improvement: Continuously analyze and find ways to improve current UI/UX workflows and processes, making them more efficient and user-friendly for both the team and end-users, ultimately enhancing the overall product experience.
• Plumage Update Suggestions: Work closely with external groups that provide core UI components ("plumage") to propose and guid