Senior UX Researcher / Designer

Agile Six is a people-first, remote-work company that serves shoulder-to-shoulder with federal agencies to find innovative, human-centered solutions. We build better by putting people first. We are animated by our core values of Purpose, Wholeness, Trust, Self-Management and Inclusion. We deliver our solutions in autonomous teams of self-managed professionals (no managers here!) who genuinely care about each other and the work. We know that’s our company’s purpose – and that we can only achieve it by supporting a culture where people feel valued, self-managed, and love to come to work.

The role

Agile Six is looking for a Senior UX Researcher / Designer for the Sitewide team, working on VA.gov. This team oversees a broad portfolio of products in the unauthenticated VA.gov experience, including some that are powered by a Drupal content management system (CMS) back-end. Products include: the VA.gov homepage, header, and footer; VA.gov site search; Find a Form; Find a VA Location; high-visibility content types and eligibility wizards related to Veteran benefits; the CMS UX for Drupal-driven products; among others.

This UX Researcher / Designer will have a breadth of UX knowledge with technical expertise in user research including discovery, synthesis, and documentation. This role entails collaborating with our team to design and implement highly complex, cross-disciplinary projects for government agencies and the people they serve, including context switching across a variety of products in our portfolio as required, and designing interface elements of the Drupal CMS. Among your responsibilities will be to communicate your design vision to both team members and key stakeholders at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). You have an adaptive, empathetic, and collaborative mindset and care deeply about team dynamics. Most importantly, you have a passion for working on important problems that have a lasting impact on millions of users and make a difference in our government!

Our team’s mission is to provide a modernized, accessible, single source of truth for Veterans to access information about VA facilities and services available at those locations. For more context on the team’s work, please visit these GitHub repositories:

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/content-build
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-api

Responsibilities

• Lead user research efforts, including discovery, synthesis, and documenting the results and findings, including for research sessions that specifically require participants using assistive technologies
• Experienced with a variety of research methodologies such as heuristic evaluations, generative research, tree testing, card sorting and user interviews
• Collaboratively create and evolve user stories and acceptance criteria with product owner and wider Scrum team
• Communicate potential costs and tradeoffs of different processes and research approaches while working with incomplete requirements
• Clearly articulate your thought processes through verbal and written explanation, whiteboard, sketching, or quick mock-ups to small or large groups
• Use the VA Design System and design with repeatable patterns across the portfolio. Collaborate with Design System team when necessary around iteration and improvement of design system components
• Collaborate with the product owner and engineers to ensure implementation matches intent across all design components
• Keep UX work in sync with the product roadmap and flag delays or issues in research and design
• Communicate and collaborate with stakeholders and team members across a range of disciplines throughout the VA
• Support the practice of design and research within the larger company as needed through activities such as:
  • Assisting in outreach, recruitment, and hiring efforts
  • Occasionally participating in or otherwise supporting business development efforts, including code or design challenges, writing or reviewing proposal responses, etc.
  • Participating in communities of practice
• We expect the responsibilities of this position to shift and grow organically over time, in response to considerations such as the unique strengths and interests of the selected candidate and other team members and an evolving understanding of the delivery environment.

Basic qualifications

• 7+ years of experience working as UX researcher / designer or related position in collaboration with digital product teams (enterprise environment a plus)
• Ability to be autonomous, take initiative, and effectively communicate status and progress
• Portfolio illustrating your process and samples of native product design work driven by quantitative and qualitative user research
• Understand human-centered design, interaction design fundamentals, and UI design and research best practices, including accessibility
• Proficient in Figma and modern prototyping tools
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners and other designers and researchers, seeking and providing feedback in an Agile environment
• Adaptive, empathetic, collaborative and holds a positive mindset

Additional desired qualifications

• Familiarity with the US Web Design System
• Experience working with government agencies
• You are a U.S. Veteran

At Agile Six, we are committed to building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Even if you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply. We’re eager to meet people who believe in our mission and who can contribute to our team in a variety of ways.

Salary and Sixer Benefits

The salary for this position is $140,532. 

Our benefits are designed to reinforce our core values of Wholeness, Self Management and Inclusion. The following benefits are available to all employees. We respect that only you know what balance means for your life and season. While we offer support from coaches, we expect you to own your wholeness, show up for work whole, and go home to your family the same. You will be seen, heard and valued. We expect you to offer the same for your colleagues, be kind (not controlling), be caring (not directive) and ready to participate in a state of flow. We mean it when we say “We build better by putting people first”.

All Sixers Enjoy:

• Self-managed work/life balance and flexibility
• Competitive and equitable salary (equal pay for equal work)
• Employee Stock Ownership (ESOP) for all employees!
• 401K matching
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Employer paid short and long term disability insurance
• Employer paid life insurance
• Self-managed and generous paid time off
• Paid federal holidays and two floating holidays
• Paid parental leave
• Self-managed professional development spending
• Self-managed wellness days

Hiring practices

Agile Six Applications, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, pregnancy, disability, work-related injury, covered veteran status, political ideology, marital status, or any other factor that the law protects from employment discrimination.

Note: We participate in E-Verify. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. Unfortunately, we are unable to sponsor visas at this time.

If you need assistance or reasonable accommodation in applying for any of these positions, please reach out to careers@agile6.com. We want to ensure you have the ability to apply for any position at Agile Six.

Please read and respond to the application questions carefully. Interviews are conducted on a rolling basis until the position has been filled.