Senior Product Designer (UI/UX)

About this role

You own the design of a greenfield federal case-management system. The users are captive and underserved, which is the best design brief there is. Nobody chose the system they use today. Every workaround they have built — the side spreadsheet, the printed form, the "just call me instead" — is a defect report you get to read directly, and the bar is low enough that raising it is worth an enormous amount.

You get access to real users. Research, workflow observation and validation sessions are in the delivery plan and funded. This is not design from a requirements document.

Between delivery milestones you design the interface for Emma, our agentic architecture platform — which is an unsolved design problem and a genuinely fun one.

The hard problems are design problems

• Practitioners work under policy with legally distinct case pathways. The interface has to make the right path obvious without pretending the rules are simpler than they are
• Some records must not be discoverable. The interface cannot leak that one exists — not through a result count, not through a greyed-out row, not through an error message that is subtly different. Designing an absence that is invisible but not deceptive is a real craft problem, and most people get it wrong
• There is an analytics workbench to design: correlations across risk factors, explainable, explicitly non-adjudicative. It has to be genuinely useful for finding patterns and it has to make it structurally hard to mistake a correlation for a verdict about a family
• Multi-facility, multi-role, heavy data entry, low tolerance for a mis-click

What you will actually do

• Own research through delivery: workflows, information architecture, interaction, visual, and a real component system
• Run research and validation sessions with practitioners and program staff
• Design the sensitive-record model in the interface — the non-discoverability behavior is yours to get right
• Design the analytics explorer: filtering, cohorting, factor comparison, suppression rules, export
• Build and maintain the component library in React and TypeScript alongside the engineer, so design decisions survive contact with the codebase
• Own accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA / Section 508) as a design property, not a remediation pass

What we need

• Portfolio depth on one or two genuinely complex products. We would rather see one gnarly enterprise or clinical tool you fought through than fifteen landing pages
• You can show your reasoning — what you tried, what you killed, what a user did that surprised you and what you changed because of it
• Genuine craft. Typography, hierarchy, density, restraint. A data-dense professional tool that still feels deliberate and calm
• Real research experience, including having changed your own mind
• You are comfortable in code. Not an engineer, but able to work in a React component library, read the JSX, and adjust the token rather than filing a ticket about it
• Accessibility fluency — you design for it up front
• Opinions, held loosely. Nobody outranks you on this, which means the discipline has to come from you

Helps, does not gate

• Clinical, EHR, case-management, or public-safety products
• Government or otherwise regulated environments
• Design systems built from scratch; data visualization craft; motion
• Prototyping in code; prior experience designing for AI or agentic systems

Being straight with you about the constraints

• Fixed scope, fixed price, milestone-gated schedule. Design has to land ahead of build and it has to be decisive. There is not room for a six-week exploration phase
• Synthetic data, fictional locations. You will never see a real record
• Fully remote, DMV area preferred. Occasional in-person is real — credentialing requires in-person appointments
• Government access takes months. You will be designing against research and synthetic data in our own environment long before you are inside anything government-hosted
• U.S. citizenship is required, and you must be able to obtain a government-issued credential for access to a controlled-unclassified environment and pass a favorable federal background investigation. This is not a preference — it follows directly from the credentialing and platform access the work requires. No active clearance is needed to apply.
• This is a 1099 contract engagement, not employment. You invoice hourly, you carry your own taxes and insurance, and there are no benefits. The rate reflects that rather than pretending otherwise. The initial engagement runs roughly six months to an initial capability milestone; continuation beyond it is intended and not yet funded