Sr. Principal UX Engineer

About the role

We are hiring a Senior Principal UI/UX Designer to own user experience and interface design inside an Extreme Programming (XP) product team. User research is the heart of this role: you will spend a substantial share of your time with users, running interviews, observation and usability testing, and turning what you learn into designs you ship with engineers every iteration.

Rapid Capabilities is the product development org at Clarity Innovations. A lean team of engineers builds and maintains the company's flagship product suites, Aurora Enterprise and Manifest, and sets the practices for all capability development company-wide. This role is the org's dedicated UX owner, working closely with the Chief Product Manager and engineering leads.

What you'll do

• Lead continuous user research as an ongoing part of the job, not a one-time phase: plan and run user interviews, contextual inquiry, field observation and usability tests every iteration.
• Build and keep direct, recurring access to users and customer stakeholders, including expert and operational users.
• Synthesize findings into personas, journey maps, jobs-to-be-done and opportunity areas the team uses to set priorities.
• Turn research into testable hypotheses and user stories with clear UX acceptance criteria, working with the product manager.
• Validate designs with real users before and after release; track usability measures (task success, time on task, SUS) and feed results into the backlog.
• Make research a team sport: bring engineers into interviews and test sessions, and keep a shared, searchable research repository.
• Use AI tools to speed up the design process: synthesizing interview notes and transcripts, drafting research plans and scripts, exploring design variations, and generating working prototypes, while keeping human judgment and real user evidence at the center.
• Apply design principles to Department of War (DoW) mission contexts: design for operators and analysts making high-stakes decisions under time pressure, with dense information, in degraded or disconnected environments, and within security and accreditation constraints.
• Own end-to-end UX for one or more product areas: flows, information architecture, interaction design and visual UI.
• Work as a full member of the XP team: join planning, stand-ups and retrospectives, and pair with engineers on implementation details daily.
• Break design work into thin, shippable slices that fit one iteration, rather than delivering large up-front specs.
• Prototype quickly (low to high fidelity) to test ideas with users before and during development.
• Build and maintain a shared design system and component library with engineering, so UI stays consistent across Aurora Enterprise and Manifest.
• Champion accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA or later, Section 508) and usability for complex, data-heavy enterprise and mission workflows.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of professional UI/UX or product design experience, with a portfolio that includes research case studies showing how findings changed product direction.
• Deep hands-on experience planning, conducting and synthesizing both generative and evaluative research: user interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing and surveys.
• Skilled interviewer: asks neutral, open questions, listens actively, and builds rapport with both expert and non-technical users.
• Ability to recruit participants and sustain a regular research cadence within short development iterations.
• Experience designing enterprise, analytics or data-intensive applications (dashboards, maps, complex forms, workflows).
• Practical experience using AI tools (e.g. LLM assistants, AI features in design tools, AI prototyping tools) to speed up research synthesis, ideation and prototyping, with sound judgment about their limits, bias and data-handling risks.
• Understanding of DoW use cases (e.g. command and control, intelligence analysis, mission planning, logistics, geospatial workflows) and how core design principles apply there: situational awareness, cognitive load, error prevention, trust in automation, and clarity under stress.
• At least 2 years working as an embedded designer on an XP team (pair programming, TDD, short iterations, continuous integration), or a closely equivalent agile practice.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver design incrementally and adjust based on feedback from working software.
• Strong interaction design, information architecture and visual design skills.
• Fluency in a modern design and prototyping tool (e.g. Figma).
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS and component-based front-end frameworks, enough to pair productively with engineers.
• Clear communication, including presenting research findings persuasively to engineers, product managers and executives.

Preferred qualifications

• Formal training or a degree in HCI, human factors, cognitive psychology, anthropology or a related field.
• Experience researching with hard-to-reach users (operators, analysts, field personnel) or in restricted environments.
• Experience with quantitative methods: product analytics, survey design, A/B testing.
• Experience setting up research operations: participant panels, consent processes, research repositories.
• Experience creating or scaling a design system used by multiple products.
• Familiarity with Lean UX, design studios, or story mapping.
• Ability to contribute front-end code directly (e.g. React, TypeScript, CSS).
• Experience designing AI-assisted or LLM-powered interfaces.
• Direct experience on DoW programs, including research with warfighters, operators or analysts in mission or exercise settings.
• Active security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one (if required for the position).

IC4 level expectations

At IC4 you are a senior individual contributor who works independently and raises the design bar for the teams around you.

How we work

Our teams practice XP, and design is part of the team rather than a hand-off before it.

• Research every iteration: the team talks to users each cycle, and what we learn drives the backlog.
• Short iterations: design, build and review in one- to two-week cycles.
• Pairing: designers pair with engineers on UI implementation and with product on story writing.
• Whole team: design, product and engineering plan, estimate, sit in on user sessions, and retro together.
• Small releases: ship thin slices to users often and learn from real usage.
• Sustainable pace: steady, predictable delivery over heroics.

Salary Range: $93,000 - $255,000