Senior UX Designer

About us

Appnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that combines Strategy, Experience & Design, Engineering and Managed Services. We build digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as foundations for future growth.  Bold ambition. Practical action. Endless possibilities.

About the Role

Join forces with Appnovation to deliver high-impact results for one of our key strategic partners - a global leader in their field. This engagement offers a unique vantage point into a world-class organization with exceptional opportunities for professional growth and long-term career advancement.

At our partner organization, the mission is to create breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, and the company has recently rebuilt its entire technology operating model to deliver on it. The organization is becoming AI-native and agentic-supported, placing enterprise AI platforms in the hands of all 80,000 colleagues. For a designer, this is a rare, career-defining moment: a historic 177-year-old company rewiring itself around AI, feedback loops measured in days, and design decisions that shape how an entire company works and how medicines reach patients. We are seeking an innovative Manager, AI-First Design to help build these transformative platforms.

In this hands-on and execution-focused individual contributor role, you will design from inside the team—working daily with engineers, experience architects, and product owners. You will move AI-native digital products from concept to real applications, leveraging AI tools and an internal design system to dramatically shorten traditional design cycles. You will make day-to-day design decisions, surface larger strategic tradeoffs to leadership, and grow your fluency in how LLM-enabled systems behave, communicate, and act.

Key Responsibilities

• Hands-On Design Delivery: Work as an engaged, hands-on contributor within a cross-functional pod (engineers, experience architects, and product owners). Deliver rapid prototypes and digital products for assigned priority projects using AI-driven design tools.
• Rapid Iteration: Partner directly with Product and Engineering to iterate on MVPs and proof-of-concepts, validating business ideas within days.
• Agentic & Conversational Design: Design core components of Agentic AI experiences where systems plan, make decisions, call tools, and complete multi-step workflows with humans in the loop. Contribute end-to-end to Conversational UX (dialog flows, conversation state, turn-taking, confirmations, error recovery, escalation, and safe fallback behaviors).
• Assistant Behavior Patterns: Apply and help refine assistant behavior patterns (tone, grounded responses, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and trust-building interactions).
• Interactive Prototyping: Build dynamic, interactive prototypes optimized for cross-platform use, simulating agent behavior rather than static screens to validate workflows and surface risks quickly.
• Design System Contribution: Apply and extend the internal design system, contributing feedback on AI-first patterns and maintaining consistency across prototypes.
• Documentation & Handoff: Build clear design documentation for assigned work (templates, components, specifications) and leverage AI tools to streamline developer handoff.
• Accessibility & Inclusion: Ensure accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA) across all designs, applying inclusive design practices for diverse user needs.
• Product-Minded Contribution: Help frame problems, contribute to hypotheses, and connect design decisions directly to measurable outcomes (adoption, task success, time-to-resolution, trust, and quality indicators).

What We Are Looking For

Must-Have (Basic Qualifications)

• Experience: 4-6 years of progressive UX design experience with a track record of contributing to high-impact digital products.
• AI & Prototyping Tools: Solid experience working with AI-driven design tools and platforms, with a growing understanding of how to leverage them for rapid prototyping.
• Conversational UX: Experience designing Conversational UX (chat and/or voice) components, including dialog flows, conversation state, and repair/fallback patterns.
• Agentic AI: Exposure to designing Agentic AI workflow components (systems that take actions via tools/functions), including human-in-the-loop controls and safe failure modes.
• Mindset: An "AI-first" mindset with a strong willingness to adopt augmented workflows to accelerate delivery cycles.
• Agile Delivery: Experience working within fast-paced, iterative environments, contributing to MVPs and proof-of-concepts under tight deadlines.
• Design Systems & Standards: Experience contributing to design systems, ensuring high-quality design execution and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance.
• Portfolio: A portfolio demonstrating system-level thinking, AI-powered experiences, and rapid prototyping techniques.

Nice-to-Have (Preferred Qualifications)

• Background in designing for AI-driven user experiences or technologies in complex, dynamic environments.
• Strong product design experience (beyond UI) partnering with Product and Engineering to shape scope and define outcomes.
• Familiarity with front-end development principles and technical constraints.
• Exposure to responsible AI UX patterns (transparency/disclosures, explainability cues, privacy boundaries, and trust/safety guardrails).
• Previous experience designing within the healthcare or pharmaceutical sectors.
• Exposure to AI experience evaluation approaches (conversation quality testing and scenario-based risk testing).

Who You Are

• Curious & Experimental: You experiment with new AI design tools and techniques on real work, treating a changing craft as an exciting opportunity rather than a disruption.
• Action-Oriented: You act with agency, getting just enough context to start making, improvising around missing inputs, and correcting course through the work itself.
• Craft-Focused: You treat typography, motion, tone, and interaction detail as the product rather than just polish.
• Collaborative & Adaptable: You thrive in agile environments, embrace rapid iteration and feedback, and remain resilient in the face of shifting priorities.
• Systems Thinker: You design components for reuse, considering how each pattern behaves across diverse products and agent surfaces rather than on a single screen.