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Design Manager

United States - Remote

Role Description: 

We are seeking an experienced Product Design Manager to lead our team of talented designers. As a Design Manager, you will play a critical role in shaping and guiding the design standards across our company. This role requires a blend of design expertise, leadership, and a deep understanding of user-centered design principles.

Your focus will be on leading and developing the design team to enable them in delivering high-quality, user-centric designs that meet our business objectives. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams—Product, Engineering, Growth, and Delivery—to ensure that design efforts are fully aligned with our company roadmap and effectively address customer needs.

Responsibilities: 

  • Manage, mentor, and coach a team of designers across different projects, fostering their professional growth and ensuring high-quality design outcomes
  • Conduct regular one on ones with direct reports, provide constructive feedback, enable their growth as professionals and complete performance reviews
  • Foster a collaborative and inclusive design culture that values creativity, innovation, and continuous learning
  • Develop and implement strategies for recruiting, retaining, and developing design talent
  • Own the end-to-end hiring process for new designers, including defining roles, screening candidates, conducting interviews, and making hiring decisions
  • Establish and maintain processes for tracking designer workloads, project allocations, and capacity planning
  • Collaborate with HR to develop competitive compensation packages and career progression frameworks for the design team
  • Oversee the maintenance of design systems, guidelines, and best practices to ensure consistency across projects and departments
  • Collaborate with product managers, engineering leaders, and other stakeholders to define project scopes, timelines, and resources
  • Represent the design team in cross-functional meetings and decision-making processes related to resourcing and team management
  • Build and maintain strong partnerships with stakeholders to ensure design alignment with company goals and customer needs.
  • Manage the design team's budget, including tools, software licenses, and professional development resources
  • Continuously evaluate and refine design and management processes to improve efficiency and output quality
  • Organize and facilitate design critiques, workshops, and other collaborative sessions to foster creativity and problem-solving
  • Strong background in UX design principles, with deep experience in creating and delivering digital products.
  • Proficiency in UX research methodologies and data analysis techniques to inform design decisions.

 

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 10-25%

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise. 

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

  • 6+ years of industry experience in product design and or UX/UI Design
  • 2+ years of experience managing design teams, with experience in a remote, distributed environment
  • Excellent interpersonal, communication, and leadership skills, with a track record of inspiring and empowering teams
  • Strong ability to plan and facilitate design and discovery workshops that drive alignment and decisions
  • Detail-oriented, highly organized, and able to prioritize tasks effectively.
  • Experience in working closely with engineering teams to ensure designs are feasible and aligned with technical constraints
  • Experience with our Prefered Design toolset: Figma, Maze, Github, Userbit, Mirro, Flowbite, Tailwind CSS, Ai design tools

Amazing To Haves

  • Background in security audited industries like Defense, Finance and Healthcare
  • Contributions to design communities or published design work
  • Familiarity with front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and an understanding of what’s possible in terms of design implementation
  • Experience working on products that involve secure software delivery or DevSecOps principles

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States. 

Remote - USA

$165,000 - $220,713 USD

Who We Are

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

What We Do

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

  • Kubernetes
  • Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
  • Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
  • Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
  • GitOps
  • Containers
  • CNCF projects and open source products and packages
  • Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
  • Building and improving security delivery
  • Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

  • Medical/Dental/Vision
  • Premiums are 100% Company Paid
  • Health Reimbursement Account
  • Life Insurance
  • Disability Insurance

Financial:

  • 401k with Employer Contribution (Regardless of Employee Contribution)
  • Company Stock Options
  • Home Office Setup Budget

Leave:

  • Unlimited paid time off, with a mandatory 10 days off on top of 11 federal government holidays, week of Thanksgiving, last two weeks of December (including New Year’s Day)
  • Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

  • Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
  • Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed. 

At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

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