UI/UX Designer

IvoryCloud is seeking a UI/UX Designer to lead human-centered design for a mission-critical federal enterprise system in a hybrid role based in Rockville, MD. This position hands you ownership of the design system and role-tailored interfaces, with a strong emphasis on accessibility and adoption across diverse government user communities. The role offers a competitive salary of USD 120,000 to 145,000 per year, eligibility for the company and Business Development bonus programs, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Benefits

• Salaried position and eligible for participation in company and Business Development bonus programs
• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Referral program
• Retirement plan
• Vision insurance

Responsibilities

• Serve as the single point of accountability for the program's user experience, owning the design system, the role-tailored interface portfolio, and the full human-centered design lifecycle from discovery through release.
• Lead structured user research across diverse mission user communities, including persona mapping, workflow analysis, friction-point identification, and heuristic audits of current screens.
• Engineer dashboards tailored to distinct user communities, each optimized for their workflows, decision points, and authorities.
• Apply the Discover-Design-Deliver approach across every sprint, ensuring user research outputs feed backlog prioritization rather than being shelved.
• Redesign data-entry workflows to promote accuracy and completeness, supporting data-quality and audit-readiness objectives.
• Author and maintain a program-specific design system with a component library, interaction patterns, accessibility annotations, and visual style guidelines in a shared repository.
• Embed Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA compliance in wireframes, prototypes, and production designs from concept onward.
• Collaborate with Frontend Developers to preserve design intent during implementation, conducting design reviews on every user-facing pull request before merge.
• Facilitate iterative usability testing (moderated and unmoderated) within each sprint, with findings guiding the next sprint and backlog refinement.
• Lead user acceptance testing with the Government Product Owner prior to production releases to ensure accessibility, usability, and workflow fit.
• Partner with the Product Manager and Business Analyst to translate stakeholder requests into validated design problems, balancing vocal feedback with structured research findings.
• Maintain a continuous feedback loop with mission users through interviews, usability sessions, analytics review, and helpdesk pattern analysis, linking insights to backlog input.
• Develop change management and training artifacts for each release in collaboration with the Training Specialist to reduce adoption friction and support load.
• Produce rapid wireframes and clickable prototypes for stakeholder validation before development commitment to reduce rework risk.
• Conduct heuristic evaluations and competitive analyses of related enterprise systems to inform decisions and identify cross-system pattern opportunities.
• Contribute to program reporting with visuals that communicate user impact, adoption metrics, and accessibility posture to government leadership.
• Maintain a UX risk register tracking usability debt, accessibility findings, and stakeholder satisfaction with status visible in shared dashboards.
• Ensure adherence to quality and process standards for requirements management and verification, especially for user-facing acceptance criteria.
• Represent UI/UX capability in technical interchange meetings, design reviews, and working groups; provide design feasibility input to program leadership.
• Mentor and develop supporting Frontend Developers, Business Analysts, and visiting design contributors; support recruiting, onboarding, and professional development of the design team.
• Research and evaluate emerging UI/UX practices, accessibility tooling, and design system evolutions, recommending pragmatic adoption only when user value or accessibility is improved.
• Technologies used include Figma, Adobe XD, HTML, CSS, React, and Angular.

Requirements

• U.S. Citizenship required.
• Active Secret clearance required.
• Minimum 7 years of UI/UX design experience on enterprise-scale software systems, including at least 4 years supporting U.S. federal customers and 2 years leading design on programs with 10,000+ end users.
• Location: National Capital Region, hybrid schedule with regular on-site presence at a client site in Northern Virginia and IvoryCloud headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. Must reside within commuting distance of the NCR and be available to report on-site within three hours of request.
• Proven experience leading the Discover-Design-Deliver lifecycle on federal Agile programs, including structured user research, persona mapping, wireframing, rapid prototyping, and iterative usability testing.
• Expert proficiency with Figma, Adobe XD, or comparable design tools; working proficiency with HTML, CSS, and modern JavaScript frameworks (React or Angular) to communicate design intent to developers.
• Exceptional oral and written communication skills, including the ability to facilitate user research sessions with senior government and military stakeholders and translate findings into prioritized backlog input.
• Direct experience engineering Section 508 / WCAG 2.1 AA compliance into design artifacts from the wireframe stage forward, not as a retroactive audit.
• Demonstrated experience designing role-tailored dashboards for distinct stakeholder communities with materially different workflows, mental models, and authorities.

Certifications

• Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification
• Interaction Design Foundation Certification
• Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC)
• Trusted Tester (DHS Section 508) Certification
• Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP) or equivalent (within six months of hire)
• Formal usability and human-centered design training (Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification, IDEO, Carnegie Mellon HCII, or equivalent) strongly preferred

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for mission-critical federal systems serving large-scale, geographically distributed user communities with differentiated workflows and authorities
• Direct experience with defense security cooperation, Foreign Military Sales (FMS), or comparable mission domains and their enterprise systems
• Experience designing for classified environments (NIPR/SIPR) with classification-aware UI patterns, role-based access controls, and multi-level security workflow constraints
• Experience designing within a CMMI Level 3 or higher appraised Agile delivery organization
• Track record of UI/UX work cited in user satisfaction improvement, adoption metrics, or data-quality outcomes on federal program reviews

Application questions

• This role requires U.S. citizenship. Please type 'citizen' if you meet this requirement.
• Do you meet the hybrid requirements of on-site work in Arlington, VA and Rockville, MD?