Staff/Principal Product Designer

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, product designers play a critical role in understanding the problem space, identifying opportunities, and developing solutions using a lean-agile approach. Product designers are the primary user advocate on their team and engage in continuous research throughout the product life cycle. Working end-to-end from concept to implementation, product designers conduct research, facilitate design activities, and ensure the product team is building the right thing.

What you’ll do

• 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

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• 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

Nice-to-have qualifications

• 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

Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We consider candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.

Other requirements

• 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.

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a fully remote role.

Care package

Salary

We want to give you the most competitive salary possible. After all, you deserve it! To that end, we use the results of our interview process to determine what salary is most appropriate given your current level of seniority.