Senior Staff Product Designer (R2937)

Introduction to Shield AIFounded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, Shield AI is building the world’s best AI pilot. Its AI pilot, Hivemind, has flown a fighter jet (F-16), a vertical takeoff and landing drone (V-BAT), and a quadcopter (Nova). The company has offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington DC and abroad. Shield AI’s products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies.

The Senior Staff Product Designer role within Shield AI’s Hivemind organization is responsible for solving complex User Experience and Product Design problems associated with the end-to-end user experience of developing, deploying, testing and evaluating autonomy solutions.

The core products developed by the Hivemind organization target multiple user personae, ranging from the external end-user (the “Operator” of autonomous systems), to the Test engineer (who tests and evaluates autonomous systems in software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop and real-world flight test environments), to the AI engineer (who develops and tests autonomy architectures). Significant portions of the product are best described as developer facing software product (i.e. SDKs, CLIs) and require contribution from designers that have relevant experience.

Other portions of the product leverage web technologies and UIs to support configuration management, scenario design, mission planning, mission rehearsal, debrief, and test and evaluation process. The supported workflows with these products range from the highly visual/experiential experience of the operator using a ground-control-station (GCS) client to mission plan and command-and-control, to autonomy engineers working within the Integrated Development Environment, to Test Engineers using the web portal and extensible CLI tool. As such, Hivemind is a highly complex and technical product that enables complex workflows across multiple collaborating teams.

What you'll do:

• Work closely with members of the Office of the CTO to crystallize the vision of the Hivemind product and its documentation
• Lead the user experience design of the Hivemind Forge web portal
• Lead the user experience design of the expansive and interactive documentation system for the Hivemind product
• Work closely with the technical leads of Hivemind Commander (mission planning, command and control, air-ground communications) and Hivemind Forge (configurations, test and evaluation, rehearsal, analysis) to enhance the user experience of their products
• Conduct user research to understand user personae and their needs
• Investigate competing products and their user experiences, synthesize findings to present to engineering and product leadership

Required qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of experience as a product and/or user experience designer with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Masters degree or equivalent in design, interaction design, human-computer-interaction, or similar
• Experience with highly complex software products
• Experience with product and user experience design of software products delivered with React / web-stack
• Comfortable working within a Linux environment, experience with the Linux terminal
• Thrives in a high-velocity product development environment
• Is comfortable with ambiguity and is able to produce results with high-level guidance

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with user experience design of autonomous systems
• Experience with user experience design video games
• Experience designing for “Low Code” or “No Code” systems
• Experience and/or comfort reading C++ and/or Python and/or Typescript