Senior Designer
Job number: 789

This is a remote position.

The Federal Civilian business unit supports many customers spanning the federal, commercial, and nonprofit space. Our customers include NASA, the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, the Library of Congress, Health & Human Services, and the FDIC. We partner with these agencies to build new capabilities, deliver products, establish data as a strategic asset for informed decision-making, modernize legacy systems, and build the digital service infrastructure necessary to scale their mission impact.

Primary Responsibilities

Senior Designer serves as an experienced individual contributor within a team, with the expectation that you will further develop your leadership, guidance, and mentoring skills. With minimal oversight from leadership, you will be responsible for supporting the goal of meeting scope, schedule, and delivery requirements. A Senior Designer impacts the long-term goals of the program, while contributing to the development of the program's design strategy. You may serve as the discipline's primary lead when working with stakeholders and utilize strong influential skills to drive improvements in design processes and practices. Primary expectations of a Senior Designer include:

• Lead UX design work across program workstreams including discovery artifacts, user flows, wireframes, low and high fidelity prototypes, and heuristic evaluations in Figma using federal Design System components
• Drive Design System governance, proposing and validating new components, design tokens, and patterns through the six-step contribution workflow in collaboration with frontend engineers and agency stakeholders
• Conduct and synthesize user research including stakeholder interviews, usability testing, and workflow observations, delivering actionable findings that inform PI planning feature prioritization
• Annotate Figma designs with keyboard navigation, ARIA patterns, focus management, and screen reader labels before sprint planning, ensuring accessibility requirements are defined before code is written
• Collaborate with UX researchers, accessibility specialists, frontend engineers, and product owners to validate designs for technical feasibility and Section 508 compliance before sprint commitment
• Lead competitive analysis and heuristic evaluations, presenting findings and recommendations to federal stakeholders and program leadership
• Facilitate cross-functional design discussions with multi-disciplined teams, translating complex regulatory and policy requirements into clear, user-centered design solutions
• Contribute to and maintain versioned Figma libraries accessible to frontend engineers and software team managers across all program workstreams
• Mentor junior designers with actionable, growth-oriented feedback and lead design critiques that maintain quality and consistency across the program
• Identify design risks and communicate recommendations to mitigate them to program leadership
• Participate in candidate homework evaluations and panel interviews

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant UX and product design experience and a Bachelor's degree, or equivalent additional experience in lieu of a degree
• Must meet federal suitability requirements and pass a background investigation as a condition of employment
• Expert proficiency in Figma for wireframing, prototyping, and Design System contribution and governance
• Demonstrated experience leading human-centered design processes end-to-end, from discovery through validated, production-ready designs
• Strong working knowledge of WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards and how they apply at the design stage, including annotation practices for keyboard navigation, ARIA, and focus management
• Experience conducting and synthesizing user research including usability testing with assistive technology users
• Proven ability to contribute to and govern Design System component libraries across a large, multi-team program
• Strong storytelling and presentation skills, able to distill complex design decisions for federal agency stakeholders and executive audiences
• Experience working within agile or SAFe delivery environments, integrating design work into sprint-based development timelines
• Prior experience mentoring junior designers and leading design critiques

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience with federal agency digital services or government contracting environments
• Familiarity with LCR 5-220 or comparable federal accessibility standards
• Experience authoring accessibility conformance reports or VPATs prior to major releases
• Familiarity with a federal agency user-centered design process including Discover, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Validate phases
• Experience with Miro, Adobe Creative Suite, or other collaborative design and research tooling
• Exposure to SAFe PI planning and cross-team design coordination across multiple workstreams

To learn more about working at Ad Hoc, please visit:https://adhocteam.us/join

Benefits:

• Company-subsidized health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401K with employer match
• Paid parental leave after one year of service
• Employee Assistance Program

In support of various state and city equal pay transparency laws, Ad Hoc job descriptions feature the starting range we reasonably expect to pay to candidates who would join our team with little to no need for training on the responsibilities we've outlined above. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide range of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and responsibility. The range of starting pay for this role is $125,000 - $160,000. Our recruiters will be happy to answer any questions you may have, and we look forward to learning more about your salary requirements.