Staff/Principal Product Designer

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. The Staff/Principal Product Designer will play a critical role in understanding problem spaces, identifying opportunities, and developing solutions while engaging in continuous research throughout the product life cycle.

Responsibilities:

• Plan and conduct research that informs strategic product and design direction across multiple workstreams
• Define end-to-end flows that incorporate well-thought-out information architecture, systems thinking, design principles, and common design patterns — including for secure, sensitive data exchanges
• Create simple, elegant user interfaces and evolve existing visual systems with clear rationale
• Uphold human-centered design principles and evangelize their value to stakeholders, engagement partners, and subject matter experts
• Balance user and business needs within an agile working environment, and promote empathy for the public and government workers as we improve their tools
• Set design standards across the engagement and mentor other designers, raising the quality bar beyond your own work

Requirements:

• A portfolio of end-to-end product design for complex products — from research through accessible UI — and the patterns, components, and standards that other teams adopt
• Able to plan, synthesize, and share out generative and evaluative user research to inform product and design direction
• Can define scalable, end-to-end interaction flows that incorporate key design principles, intentional information architecture, common design patterns, and accessibility
• Can create simple, elegant, and thoughtful user interfaces through the implementation of visual design elements
• Can contribute to product strategy decisions by serving as the primary voice for users and balancing user and business needs
• Strong facilitation and communication skills, including the ability to make design decisions visible to stakeholders, partners, and engineers and drive alignment without losing the user
• Experience setting design direction across multiple workstreams or teams and mentoring other designers (principal level)
• Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
• Passionate about creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
• Ability to travel for work from time to time
• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories
• Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment
• You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship
• You must complete a company background check successfully
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute
• Experience designing services that handle sensitive personal data (e.g., tax, financial, or benefits information)
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote-team environment