Director, Inclusive Design & Accessibility

Our Fortune 500 company is driving a digital transformation and looking for forward-thinking innovators to disrupt how our industry thinks about and uses technology. As one of the world's leading employee benefits providers, we help millions of people gain affordable access to benefits that help them protect their families, their finances and their futures.

Are you an asker of questions, a solver of problems, and a challenger of the status quo? Our mission is to provide a differentiated customer experience and exceed the expectations people have of technology at any company — not just insurers. We are seeking individuals to join our team of talented IT professionals who share never-ending passion and an unwavering focus on our customer experience.

Team members comfortable working in an agile, fast-paced, and delivery-focused environment thrive in our environment where we value an entrepreneurial spirit and those who challenge the status-quo.

Unum is changing, and we’re excited about what’s next. Join us.

General

Summary:

The Director, Inclusive Design & Accessibility leads a centralized UX design practice and owns the enterprise capability for inclusive design and digital accessibility. The role combines people leadership with standards, governance, education, tooling, and cross-functional influence to embed accessible, user-centered practices throughout the software development lifecycle.

This is a campus-based, onsite position.

Principal

Duties & Responsibilities Lead UX Design Talent & Practice Manage, coach, and develop UX designers through performance management, career development, succession planning, and ongoing feedback.

Align assignments, capacity, and skills with product priorities; identify staffing and capability gaps.

Set expectations for design quality, inclusive design, user-centered methods, documentation, collaboration, and professional practice.

Provide design leadership across digital products, balancing user needs, business outcomes, usability, and accessibility.

Build an inclusive, psychologically safe culture of learning, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Advance inclusive, user-centered design

Champion diverse user needs, contexts, abilities, and barriers from discovery through production.

Establish practices for research collaboration, usability evaluation, accessible annotations, design-system use, and cross-functional handoffs.

Guide teams in applying inclusive design and accessibility to interactions, information architecture, content, prototypes, and production experiences.

Connect user evidence, accessibility needs, business outcomes, technical feasibility, and risk in stakeholder recommendations.

Operationalize accessibility across the SDLCDefine accessibility practices across planning, discovery, requirements, design, development, testing, release, and monitoring.

Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Quality, Dev Ops, Risk, Legal, and Compliance to embed requirements, acceptance criteria, checkpoints, and verification.

Create scalable templates, checklists, annotations, definitions of done, review practices, and escalation paths.

Promote early engagement and shift-left practices that prevent barriers and reduce avoidable production defects.

Clarify shared accountability while delivery leaders retain responsibility for implementation, testing, remediation, and release.

Own standards, governance & enablement

Establish accessibility standards aligned with organizational commitments, applicable requirements, and recognized guidelines.

Serve as senior subject matter expert for WCAG conformance, assistive technology compatibility, accessible patterns, and digital barriers.

Curate approved resources and tooling for design review, code analysis, manual…