Senior Staff Product Designer (R3040) - Shield AI

Job Title: Senior Staff Product Designer (R3040)
Job Location: San Diego Metro Area
Job Listing URL: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/0e042fdf-9dcc-4ea9-b0a0-0a2df1f9b024
Job Description: About Shield AI
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its flagship autonomy software, Hivemind, powers aircraft, drones, and other platforms, enabling complex missions with high reliability in contested environments. With offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and internationally, Shield AI’s products actively support U.S. and allied operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn,Twitter, and Instagram.

The Staff/Sr. Staff Product Designer role within Shield AI’s Hivemind organization is responsible for solving complex User Experience and Product Design problems associated with the end-to-end user experience of developing, deploying, testing and evaluating autonomy solutions. The core products developed by the Hivemind organization target multiple user personae, ranging from the external end-user (the “Operator” of autonomous systems), to the Test engineer (who tests and evaluates autonomous systems in software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop and real-world flight test environments), to the AI engineer (who develops and tests autonomy architectures). Significant portions of the product are are best described as developer facing software product (i.e. SDKs, CLIs) and require contribution from designers that have relevant experience. Other portions of the product leverage web technologies and UIs to support configuration management, scenario design, mission planning, mission rehearsal, debrief, and test and evaluation process. The supported workflows with these products range from the highly visual/experiential experience of the operator using a ground-control-station (GCS) client to mission plan and command-and-control, to autonomy engineers working within the Integrated Development Environment, to Test Engineers using the web portal and extensible CLI tool. As such, Hivemind is a highly complex and technical product that enables complex workflows across multiple collaborating teams.
What You'll Do:
Work closely with members of the Office of the CTO to crystallize the vision of the Hivemind product and its documentation
Lead the user experience design of the Hivemind web portal
Lead the user experience design of the expansive and interactive documentation system for the Hivemind product
Work closely with the technical leads of Hivemind Commander (mission planning, command and control, air-ground communications) and Hivemind Design (configurations, test and evaluation, rehearsal, analysis) to enhance the user experience of their products
Conduct user research to understand user personae and their needs
Investigate competing products and their user experiences, synthesize findings to present to engineering and product leadership
Required Qualifications:
Masters degree or equivalent in design, interaction design, human-computer-interaction, or similar
8+ years of experience as a product and/or user experience designer
Experience with highly complex software products
Experience with product and user experience design of software products delivered with React / web-stack
Comfortable working within a Linux environment, experience with the Linux terminal
Thrives in a high-velocity product development environment
Is comfortable with ambiguity and is able to produce results with high-level guidance
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with user experience design of autonomous systems
Experience with user experience design video games
Experience designing for “Low Code” or “No Code” systems
Experience and/or comfort reading C++ and/or Python and/or Typescript