Vice President of Design

Company Description

Air is the leader in Enterprise Readiness. Our mission is to establish readiness as a real-time condition that is continuously achieved. Today, a dangerous Readiness Gap exists between what the front line needs and what is delivered. Our AI-native platform, Air Enterprise Readiness, aligns development, production, delivery, and sustainment into one coordinated execution system for government agencies and industrial suppliers. By revealing true capacity, exposing real constraints, coordinating resources, and executing at the speed of operational demands, the front line gets what it needs to succeed.

Job Description

Air's customers run programs where one late part can hold up an entire fleet. Our platform pulls development, production, delivery, and sustainment into one execution system. The design challenge is making that system legible to the people who run it, and deciding with them where AI should act, where it should advise, and where it should stay out of the way.

As VP of Design, reporting to the CPTO, you'll lead product design, research, and design systems as a peer to Product, Engineering, and Data. You'll be in the room when we decide what to build and stay in it through delivery.

This role is a full-time position located out of our office in Arlington, VA / Pittsburgh, PA / San Francisco, CA / Anywhere in the US.

This role may require up to 25% travel.

Scope of Responsibilities

Set vision for the product experience

• Define an experience strategy for the Air platform that connects directly to how customers reach readiness, and to how Air wins and keeps accounts.
• Establish the principles that guide design decisions across teams, so hundreds of small calls add up to one coherent product.
• Identify the critical workflows across development, production, delivery, and sustainment, and make them measurable at the leadership level.

Design the system, not just the screens

• Map how work, data, and decisions actually move across a customer's enterprise and supply base. Use that map to shape product architecture and roadmap priorities.
• Work with Engineering and Data leadership on platform architecture so the product shows real constraints, opportunities, and solutions.
• Set the patterns for human–AI collaboration in agentic workflows. That means deciding what the system does on its own, what it recommends, what a person must approve, and how people know when to trust it.
• Build a design system and interaction language that scales across products, and that teams adopt because it makes them faster.

Co-create with the people who know the work

• Bring customers, domain experts, and internal teams into the design process early, through working sessions, live prototypes, and field visits, rather than presenting finished work for approval.
• Build a research practice that pairs field research in operational settings (depots, factories, program offices) with evaluative testing, and that informs product decisions as well as design decisions.
• Lead alignment across Product, Engineering, Data, and go-to-market when priorities compete. Turn competing mental models into a shared picture teams can build against.

Build the design organization

• Recruit and develop a team spanning product design, research, design systems, and AI interaction design. Grow leaders to support a scaling company.
• Lead the design function's shift into an AI-native development process: prototyping in code, working directly with models, and shortening the path from idea to something users can react to.
• Create career paths and a culture of craft, collaboration, and candor.

Qualifications

• U.S. Citizenship is required

Required Skills:

• 10+ years in product design, including 5+ years leading design organizations, ideally as the senior design leader reporting to a C-level executive.
• A track record of design shaping product strategy and business outcomes in complex enterprise, analytics, or AI-native software.
• Systems thinking at the scale of a business, such as platform strategy, multi-product unification, service design, or workflows that span organizations.
• Experience leading co-creation with domain experts and executives in technical domains you didn't start out knowing, and turning that work into a shipped product.
• Hands‑on fluency with AI, including designing for agentic or model‑driven products and understanding how they fail.
• Deep grounding in research and HCI.
• Experience in high-growth environments where you built structure without slowing the team down.

Desired Skills:

• Current possession of a U.S. security clearance, or the ability to obtain one with our sponsorship
• Background in supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or industrial operations

We firmly believe that past performance is the best indicator of future performance. If you thrive while building solutions to complex problems, are a self‑starter, and are passionate about making an impact in global security, we’re eager to hear from you.

Air is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Air’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.