Principal Product Designer, F9

About F9
F9 is a mission-oriented team of Principal Software Engineers that have come together to deliver modern software engineering capabilities to the United States Defense Industry. Our customers include the United States Air Force, Aerospace, Raytheon, and Harris.

F9’s CEO, Eric Schoonover, started his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Netflix where he progressed from a risky hire with no experience and no education to a principal level software engineer. He co-founded a YCombinator-funded startup after leaving Netflix and eventually landed at Time Inc as Vice President of Engineering. Prior to founding F9, he was Director of Engineering for the United States Digital Service in the Executive Office of the President, and Director of Engineering at the Defense Digital Service in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

All F9 principals have extensive private sector experience and deeply value a culture of effective software engineering, freedom, and responsibility.

Responsibilities
Principal Product Designers own the complete end-to-end design of complex, enterprise-scale software. They are experts in every aspect of user experience (UX) design, visual design (VxD), user research, design technology, and design project management. Principal Product Designers work directly with stakeholders from all levels of the organization to understand every aspect of their customers' and stakeholder needs, often driving consensus across large organizations. Their portfolio demonstrates extensive industry experience designing and shipping successful user experiences (sometimes to millions of customers) with little to no outside guidance.

As a Product Designer on the project, you will be responsible for:
  •  Providing a high-level UX vision across the entire organization
  •  Producing world-class, data-driven designs, from IA and wireframes to final pixel-perfect visual design
  •  Overseeing and ensuring UX consistency between several software systems across multiple teams
  •  Mentoring teams of designers to conduct user research to gather requirements and test designs
  •  Delivering all aspects of software design: IA, UX, wireframes, prototypes, visual design, specifications, and user research
  •  Defining cross-product UI/UX standards, and evangelizing these conventions across the organization
  •  Creating pixel-perfect final designs and specifications
  •  Working directly with software engineers in a self-driven manner via Git Merge Requests and other software engineering practices
  •  Professionally presenting your designs to all levels of leadership, and using data to drive consensus
  •  Defining user metrics, and using that data to continuously improve your projects after launch
  •  Managing and reporting on design projects (work item tracking, status reporting, roadmaps, etc.)
  •  Owning and successfully leading 5+ design projects simultaneously

Required Capabilities
You are obsessed with your customers' goals, and have demonstrated success distilling customer requirements into simple UI/UX solutions. You have a demonstrated track record of not only shipping successful large-scale products reaching potentially millions of customers, and the ability to manage and track many design projects at once. Your portfolio represents the leading edge of software UI/UX design.

Other Qualifications
  • Bachelor Degree in Interaction Design or equivalent Design degree, or equivalent industry experience
  •  At least 8 years’ experience working as a Product Designer on many software projects
  •  Expert-level proficiency in the tools of the trade: The Adobe Suite, Sketch, Axure, InVision, Framer, and others
  •  Resume must include a varied selection of a successfully-launched designs
  •  Experience working in an engineering-focused organization
  •  An extensive online portfolio of past work, including one thorough case-study that illustrates your end-to-end product design methodology and philosophy

Nice-to-Haves
  • Front-end or back-end software development experience
  • Portfolio includes working interactive prototypes
  • Multi-modal design experience (voice, VR, AR, etc.)

Working at F9
Generous Compensation
We came for the mission, but we know the market value of the best people. We offer generous compensation packages in-line with industry.

DIY Benefits
We give our employees a generous allowance to use on a healthcare plan of their choice from several flexible tiers and formats. If you don't spend it all, you keep the difference.

Gear for Professionals
We understand that having the right gear makes your life better, and your work better. Premium noise-cancelling headphones, a top-of-the-line computer of your choice, and a baller mechanical keyboard are all standard issue. Something else? No problem. We trust our team to expense what they need.

Unlimited PTO
As a group of senior and principal engineers, most of us have families and—quite frankly—amazing lives outside of work. Get things done, but take as much time as you need, when you need it.

Ownership & Freedom
F9 hires experts in their field and trusts them to make the most of their time. You will own every aspect of your work, because we trust you to be awesome.

Proper Playtime
Whether it's snowmobiling in the mountains or dining at some of the best restaurants in the world, our team outings are not standard corporate events. You will never be forced to participate in mediocre mandatory fun.

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