Senior/Staff Product Designer (U. S. Air Force)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, product designers play a critical role in understanding the problem space, identifying opportunities, and developing solutions using a lean-agile approach. Product designers are the primary user advocate on their team and engage in continuous research throughout the product life cycle. Working end-to-end from concept to implementation, product designers conduct research, facilitate design activities, and ensure the product team is building the right thing.

In this role, you’ll partner with a mission-critical organization within the U.S. Air Force Special Operations community to modernize complex user experience journeys that underpin highly specialized operations. Leveraging your strengths in human-centered design and digital modernization, you’ll help deliver secure, scalable solutions that measurably improve usability, operational efficiency, and mission readiness. You will be responsible for managing and scaling a portfolio of software applications for the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) through our BESPIN partnership. Your primary focus will be on mobile application UI/UX design and user discovery.

What you’ll do

• Work alongside product managers, engineers, and other practitioners responsible for making critical decisions about product strategy 
• Plan and conduct research to inform strategic product and design direction
• Define end-to-end flows that incorporate well-thought-out information architecture, systems thinking, design principles, and common design patterns
• Create simple and elegant user interfaces and/or evolve existing visual systems with clear rationale
• Apply a design process that incorporates frequent iterations and feedback
• Create mockups and design artifacts as needed to help the team develop a shared understanding of the product vision
• Balance user and business needs within an agile working environment
• Uphold human-centered design principles and evangelize its value to stakeholders, engagement partners, and subject matter experts
• Promote empathy for the general public and government workers as we seek to improve their tools and technology

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Able to plan, synthesize, and share out generative and evaluative user research to inform product and design direction
• Proficiency in Figma and working within agile environments
• Strong experience in human-centered design (HCD)
• Ability to be flexible and navigate ambiguity
• Can define scalable, end-to-end interaction flows that incorporate key design principles, intentional information architectures, common design patterns, and accessibility
• Can create simple, elegant, and thoughtful user interfaces through the implementation of visual design elements, such as branding, illustration, iconography, typography, or microinteractions
• Understand how to use different design processes (e.g., double diamond) and can produce documentation for storytelling that helps your team and stakeholders empathize with users
• Can contribute to product strategy decisions by aligning design processes with lean/agile methodologies, serving as the primary voice for users, prioritizing and balancing user and business decisions, and crafting mental models to help define and refine product opportunities
• Can facilitate and communicate well, including communicating your design rationale to different groups (users, teammates, stakeholders) effectively
• Ability to demonstrate product design leadership through actions such as driving excellence in your team’s design execution
• Able to leverage