Senior UX Designer

Job description

### Company Description At Alertus, protecting people from harm is our mission and our passion. As the leader in mass notification, we are committed to providing customizable, scalable, and cost-effective solutions, as we know even a few seconds of warning can help save lives during an emergency. Our employees are integral to the company’s success and impact countless people's lives, safety, and well-being. We aim for a positive, collaborative environment that allows employees to work across departments easily and effectively. ### Job Description Most design roles focus on a single feature or a specific interface. This is different. As a **Senior** **UX Designer** here, you are a core architect of the "Whole Product" experience and the primary steward of our visual identity within our software. You won’t just be refining pixels; you will be sitting at the intersection of brand strategy, product vision, and technical feasibility. Working directly with our Product Development team, you will ensure our digital solutions are not only functional but are cohesive and easy to use. Your mission is to ensure that as our technical capabilities scale, our user experience remains intuitive, unified, and aligned with our brand. ***Candidates must be located within driving distance from our Baltimore HQ.*** ### A Day in the Life: - Collaborate across teams to map out the "Whole Product" journey, ensuring a seamless flow between complex technical backends and intuitive web and mobile interfaces. - Own and evolve a scalable design system that is the single source of truth for web and mobile, built so that both people and AI coding tools produce correct UI from it. That means named design tokens, Figma variables, documented component behavior, and clear mappings between design components and the code that implements them. - Implement and maintain branding techniques across all digital solutions, ensuring that every touchpoint, from typography and color theory to tone and interaction patterns stay in perfect sync with our company brand. - Transform high-level product requirements and technical constraints into functional wireframes and high-fidelity designs that result in intuitive, user-centric interfaces. - Rapidly prototype and test ideas. Use AI tooling to widen the range of options you explore, then exercise the judgment to narrow it, and be able to explain why you cut what you cut. - Conduct user research and usability testing to ensure that design choices enhance, rather than hinder, the usability and accessibility of our platform. - Other duties assigned. ### Required Skills & Abilities: - A portfolio showing interactive wireframes, end-to-end flows, and brand implementation in a real software environment. Be prepared to walk through the decisions, not just the artifacts. - Demonstrated ability to reason about how a single change ripples through an entire product ecosystem, and a track record of maintaining brand integrity across web and mobile. - Experience building and maintaining a component library or design system that engineering actually adopted, including the tokens, naming, and documentation that made adoption possible. - Mastery of modern design and prototyping tools (such as Figma, Adobe XD, or Sketch) and experience building/maintaining brand-centric component libraries. - Practical experience using AI tools in your own design workflow, with specific examples of what shipped faster or better as a result. We are interested in outcomes and in your judgment about when not to use them, not a list of products you have tried. - Experience designing for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. This is life-safety software; an interface a user with a disability cannot operate is a defect. - Experience working closely with engineers and product managers. You can defend a design decision through the dual lens of technical feasibility and user experience. - The ability to explain the "why" behind any decision you have made. You will be asked to do this throughout the interview process. - Ability to travel on occasion. ### Desired Skills: - Experience designing AI-assisted features in a production product, particularly where the cost of a wrong output is high. - Experience in emergency management, public safety, healthcare, education, or another domain where users operate the software under stress. - Hands-on experience running usability studies and user interviews and turning that feedback into measurable product improvements. ### Education & Experience: - Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Graphic Design, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field. Equivalent professional experience and a strong portfolio may substitute for formal education. - 5+ years of product-focused UX experience, including ownership of a design system used by a full engineering team. ### Alertus Career Advantages: - Unlimited Paid Time Off - Paid Holidays - 401(k) Retirement Plan - Medical, Dental, and Vision Plans - Short-term Disability, Accident, Hospital, and Cancer Insurance - Live Near Your Work HomeBuying Incentive - Employee Referral Bonuses - Flex Scheduling