Sr. Principal UX Engineer

Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.

Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure Dev Sec Ops  practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.

We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued.

Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.

We are hiring a Senior Principal UI/UX Designer to own user experience and interface design inside an Extreme Programming (XP) product team. User research is the heart of this role: you will spend a substantial share of your time with users, running interviews, observation and usability testing, and turning what you learn into designs you ship with engineers every iteration.

Rapid Capabilities is the product development org at Clarity Innovations. A lean team of engineers builds and maintains the company's flagship product suites, Aurora Enterprise and Manifest, and sets the practices for all capability development company-wide. This role is the org's dedicated UX owner, working closely with the Chief Product Manager and engineering leads.

• Lead continuous user research as an ongoing part of the job, not a one-time phase: plan and run user interviews, contextual inquiry, field observation and usability tests every iteration.
• Build and keep direct, recurring access to users and customer stakeholders, including expert and operational users.
• Synthesize findings into personas, journey maps, jobs-to-be-done and opportunity areas the team uses to set priorities.
• Turn research into testable hypotheses and user stories with clear UX acceptance criteria, working with the product manager.
• Validate designs with real users before and after release; track usability measures (task success, time on task, SUS) and feed results into the backlog.
• Make research a team sport: bring engineers into interviews and test sessions, and keep a shared, searchable research repository.
• Use AI tools to speed up the design process: synthesizing interview notes and transcripts, drafting research plans and scripts, exploring design variations, and generating working prototypes, while keeping human judgment and real user evidence at the center.
• Apply design principles to Department of War (DoW) mission contexts: design for operators and analysts making high-stakes decisions under time pressure, with dense information, in degraded or disconnected environments, and within security and accreditation constraints.
• Own end-to-end UX for one or more product areas: flows, information architecture, interaction design and visual UI.
• Work as a full member of the XP team: join planning, stand-ups and retrospectives, and pair with engineers on implementation details daily.
• Break design work into thin, shippable slices that fit one iteration, rather than delivering large up-front specs.
• Prototype quickly (low to high fidelity) to test ideas with users before and during development.
• Build and maintain a shared design system and component library with engineering, so UI stays consistent across Aurora Enterprise and Manifest.
• Champion accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA or later, Section 508) and usability for complex, data-heavy enterprise and mission workflows.

• 5+ years of professional UI/UX or product design experience, with a portfolio that includes research case studies showing how findings changed product direction.
• Deep hands-on experience planning, conducting and synthesizing both generative and evaluative research: user interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing and surveys.
• Skilled interviewer: asks neutral, open questions, listens actively, and builds rapport with both expert and…