Staff/Principal Product Designer (HHS)

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.

In this role, you’ll be part of a major modernization effort at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). You’ll collaborate with product, engineering, security, and data teammates to deliver secure, accessible, and user-centered services at enterprise scale. You’ll focus on turning insights into designs that are built, adopted, and sustained — and you’ll help federal partners build lasting design practices and systems they can carry forward.

What you’ll do

• Partner with product managers, engineers, and researchers to shape product strategy and ensure solutions meet user needs
• Plan and conduct research to uncover needs, policies, and operational constraints, then synthesize findings into actionable insights and artifacts
• Define end-to-end flows and interaction patterns that scale across complex systems and service journeys
• Create simple, thoughtful interfaces and evolve design systems with usability, accessibility, and maintainability in mind
• Prototype quickly and iteratively — from sketches to clickable mockups — to validate ideas and reduce risk
• Build accessibility, privacy, and security into designs from the start, including Section 508 accessibility standards and clear consent and data-handling patterns
• Align design decisions with measurable outcomes — define and track Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Document decisions, contribute to design systems, and facilitate workshops so government teams can sustain improvements after handoff

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Able to plan, synthesize, and share generative and evaluative research to inform product and design direction
• Skilled at defining scalable, end-to-end flows that use intentional information architecture, common design patterns, and accessibility best practices
• Capable of creating clear, elegant interfaces and explaining visual design decisions — typography, hierarchy, states, and microinteractions — with usability and maintainability in mind
• Familiar with structured design processes (e.g., double diamond) and able to use storytelling artifacts to align teammates and stakeholders
• Comfortable contributing to product strategy in a lean/agile environment — clarifying user needs, framing tradeoffs, and balancing user and business priorities
• Strong facilitation and communication skills with users, teammates, and executive stakeholders
• Commitment to capacity building — mentoring, documenting, and transferring knowledge so teams can continue improving over time
• Ability to work successfully in a professional services environment
• Passion for creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight’s core values
• Ability to spend time on‑site at HHS in Washington, DC — either by being based locally or by traveling regularly for in‑person work when it’s important

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience designing for modernization in complex or regulated environments
• Familiarity with security and compliance contexts such as the Authority to Operate (ATO) process
• Experience contributing to or maintaining design systems at scale
• Background working with technical counterparts to ensure clarity, trust, and inclusivity in complex workflows
• Experience working effectively on hybrid or distributed teams

Don’t meet 100% of the criteria but think you can do the job? We’d love to chat anyway! We’re on a mission to build diverse teams, and studies have shown that women and marginalized folks are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t check eve