Sr. Service Designer​/UX Researcher

Important Notice for Applicants:
At Bixal, we want to ensure a transparent and secure application process for all candidates. Official communication will come from an email address ending in  or from  Messages from other sources may be fraudulent, and you should exercise care to avoid any links or attachments included.
Bixal will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

Bixal is a consulting company headquartered in Fairfax, VA, working alongside governments and organizations to help them deliver better services and experiences to the communities they serve. Using evidence-based knowledge and technology, Bixal empowers clients to deliver on their missions more effectively by fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement.

Our values:

• People-First
  :
  Emphasizing the importance of people in all aspects of work.
• Collaboration and Transparency
  :
  Valuing teamwork and open communication.
• Growth Mindset
  :
  Encouraging innovation and continuous improvement.
• Creating Lasting Impact
  :
  Focusing on meaningful outcomes and positive change.

About the role:

Bixal is hiring a Senior Service Designer / UX Researcher to join our Developer Experience team on a newly awarded platform engineering contract with the Department of Education's Federal Student Aid (FSA). FSA manages nearly $1.7 trillion in federal student loans and serves more than 45 million borrowers. This contract is building the platform engineering foundation that enables FSA's engineering teams to deliver faster, more securely, and with less friction.

You will be the embedded HCD practitioner on a four-person Developer Experience team, working alongside a Technical Product Manager, a Content/Documentation Specialist, and a Software Engineer. Your job is to make the platform something developers actually want to use. You'll map the end-to-end developer journey, identify friction, run sprint-cadence usability testing, and translate research directly into the backlog. The people you're designing for are software engineers and developers, not end users of a public-facing website, and that distinction matters.

This is a full-time position. The contract consists of one 12-month base year and four 12-month option years.

Applicants must include a link to a portfolio of relevant work.

Compensation:

The salary range for this role is $125,000 – $130,000. In the spirit of transparency, most offers tend to land near the midpoint of the range. We make compensation decisions thoughtfully, considering your experience, the skills you bring, and our commitment to internal equity. Fairness and transparency are core to how we operate.

Responsibilities:

Research and Discovery

• Map the end-to-end developer journey from access request through first production deploy, identifying high-friction points at each stage.
• Plan and execute sprint-cadence user research with FSA engineering teams using methods such as contextual inquiry, usability testing, interviews, and behavioral analytics.
• Synthesize qualitative and quantitative findings into actionable insights and translate them directly into prioritized backlog items.
• rack adoption metrics and developer satisfaction (Developer NPS) to measure the impact of improvements over time.

Service Design

• Design service blueprints, interaction patterns, user flows, and high-fidelity prototypes for developer-facing products including the self-service portal, onboarding toolkit, and golden-path templates.
• Deliver design specifications and documentation that reduce implementation ambiguity and improve fidelity between design intent and what gets built.
• Collaborate with the team’s software engineer to keep the iteration loop tight within a single sprint cadence, ensuring research-backed interaction patterns are reflected in working software.
• Design responsive, accessible interfaces that account for regulatory and secure interaction requirements without degrading usability.
• Apply accessibility standards (Section 508, WCAG 2.1) to all developer-facing interfaces…