Senior Product Designer (UX) - Clearance Required

DEFCON AI is an insights company that leverages artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering for resilient optimization of complex systems. As the Senior Product Designer, you will own complex product experiences from discovery through delivery for a new AI-enabled decision-support system, collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to design user-centric solutions.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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