Senior Principal UX Engineer

The role

You will own user experience and interface design within an Extreme Programming product team. You will conduct continuous user research and turn findings into designs shipped with engineers every iteration.

What you will do

• Lead continuous user research including interviews, contextual inquiry, field observation and usability tests.
• Build and maintain direct, recurring access to users and customer stakeholders.
• Synthesize findings into personas, journey maps, jobs-to-be-done and opportunity areas.
• Turn research into testable hypotheses and user stories with UX acceptance criteria.
• Validate designs with real users and track usability measures.
• Use AI tools to speed up the design process.
• Apply design principles to Department of War mission contexts.
• Own end-to-end UX for product areas including flows, information architecture, interaction design and visual UI.
• Work as a full member of the XP team in planning, stand-ups and retrospectives.
• Build and maintain a shared design system and component library.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of professional UI/UX or product design experience.
• Portfolio that includes research case studies showing how findings changed product direction.
• Deep hands-on experience planning, conducting and synthesizing generative and evaluative research.
• Skilled interviewer.
• Ability to recruit participants and sustain a regular research cadence.
• Experience designing enterprise, analytics or data-intensive applications.
• Practical experience using AI tools to speed up research synthesis, ideation and prototyping.
• Understanding of DoW use cases.
• At least 2 years working as an embedded designer on an XP team or equivalent agile practice.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver design incrementally.
• Strong interaction design, information architecture and visual design skills.
• Fluency in a modern design and prototyping tool (e.g. Figma).

Nice to have

• Formal training or a degree in HCI, human factors, cognitive psychology, anthropology or a related field.
• Experience researching with hard-to-reach users or in restricted environments.
• Experience with quantitative methods: product analytics, survey design, A/B testing.
• Experience setting up research operations.
• Experience creating or scaling a design system used by multiple products.
• Familiarity with Lean UX, design studios, or story mapping.
• Ability to contribute front-end code directly (e.g. React, TypeScript, CSS).
• Experience designing AI-assisted or LLM-powered interfaces.
• Direct experience on DoW programs, including research with warfighters, operators or analysts in mission or exercise settings.
• Active security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.

Benefits

• Performance-based bonuses
• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Substantial paid time off and holidays
• Flexible work arrangements where possible
• Income protection benefits

About the company

Clarity Innovations is a national security partner delivering solutions to the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD). Their mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations for national security challenges.