UI/UX Designer Sr. Principal (Fairfax)

Overview

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior UI/UX Expert to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will be a UI/UX Subject Matter Expert with comprehensive expertise in Human‑Centered Design (HCD) and design thinking. This role requires a candidate who can provide detailed and useful interface design specifications to development teams, ensuring the creation of intuitive, user‑friendly applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide UI/UX Subject Matter Expertise with deep knowledge of Human‑Centered Design and design‑thinking methodologies.
• Offer expert guidance on user experience (UX) design direction and strategy.
• Act as a subject matter expert in User Experience Design, including Human Centered Design, User Research, User Personas, User Journeys, Developing, Prototyping, Design Mock‑ups, and Evaluating Usability.
• Create and deliver a User Experience (UX) Research Plan and Outcomes for each use case, which shall include a research write‑up documenting goals, anticipated outcomes, research questions, hypotheses, methodology, recruiting needs, synthesis, and next steps.
• Facilitate discovery activities such as generative research with users and business stakeholders, assessment of current related features, a content review, an information architecture review, an accessibility review, a business process review, and collection of available data and analytics, and provide a User Experience Research Checklist.
• Partner with other Product Teams to ensure that the new tool or service fits into the existing structure.
• Lead the design and development of user interfaces for various applications, ensuring they are visually appealing, user‑friendly, and efficient.
• Provide clear and actionable interface design specifications to development teams.
• Develop dynamic forms and other complex UI components, including rich cards and drag & drop features.
• Define and maintain UX frameworks and templates for developers to use during the coding process.
• Apply insights from user experience research studies to describe product functionality, including epics and user stories, as well as operational, business, functional, technical, data, and integration requirements.
• Support design synthesis activities and generate insights and opportunities for improvement. Communicate research findings through a variety of formats such as insight reports, stories, videos, storyboards, etc. to maximize relevance and impact.
• Perform requirements analysis based on User Experience Research, obtaining stakeholder input from internal users and external users.
• Develop User Personas to represent user types that have wants and needs of our applications and products.
• Create Customer and User Journey Maps and capture related data.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams, including product owners, developers, and other designers.
• Conduct usability testing sessions to gather feedback on designs and apply results to refine designs.
• Create prototypes to help visualize design.
• Write and edit plain language content for Development Teams.
• Create and test low‑, medium‑, and high‑fidelity wireframes and prototypes in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Craft, test, and deploy design deliverables, including wireframes, low‑ and high‑fidelity prototypes, or interactive web forms to facilitate usability testing and agile development of health products.
• As appropriate, create and update prototypes to conduct facilitated demos or usability testing to elicit feedback for improvements to the design.
• Lead user testing sessions and conduct thorough analysis to inform design improvements.
• Establish and uphold design standards across projects.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to ensure seamless integration of UI/UX designs.
• Work with ReactJS, JavaScript, CSS, and Tailwind to develop and refine user interfaces.
• Design within a micro‑service architecture to create scalable and maintainable solutions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, UI/UX Design, Graphic Design or related field.
• Experience in front‑end development and specifically in ReactJS and JavaScript development.
• Familiarity with UX, information architecture, content strategy, and best practices in health literacy and user centered design.
• Experience in software engineering and design architectures.
• Experience and understanding of best practices regarding system security measures.
• Experience with building and migration software and IT services to align to strategic business needs and goals.
• Experience in conducting research for advanced technologies to determine how IT can support business needs leveraging software, hardware, or infrastructure.
• Experience in Adobe XD, Axure, Balsamiq, Invision, UXPin, InDesign, Sketch.
• Experience in usability testing tools.
• Excellent problem‑solving skills and the ability to think critically.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate design concepts and decisions to stakeholders.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast‑paced environment.
• Proven track record of delivering scalable and reliable software solutions.
• A portfolio demonstrating expertise in UI/UX design and relevant projects.

Must Have

• A bachelor’s degree in a related field with a minimum of nine (9) years of professional experience in a user focused production environment.
• Familiarity with UX, information architecture, content strategy, and best practices in health literacy and user centered design.
• Strong experience in UX Design, including a deep understanding of UX Design Thinking and Principles.
• Proven experience in designing dynamic forms with a strong emphasis on intuitive user experience and efficient design.
• Proficiency with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Tailwind, and related technologies.
• Extensive experience in creating CSS cards and drag & drop functionality.
• Experience with ReactJS and JavaScript.
• Creating user scenarios, user flow, low fidelity and high‑fidelity wireframes.
• Experience on UX strategy, user researcher, user interviews, surveys, and usability study. Builds personas, user journey map, empathy maps.
• Experience on UX analysis to conduct competitive analysis, market assessments and heuristic evaluations.
• Experience on web analytics and feedback data to inform infrastructure changes and design.
• Extensive hands‑on experience in developing and testing wireframes and prototypes.
• Experience with Interaction Design, interaction modeling, and mental modeling.
• Proven experience in UI/UX design, with a focus on Human‑Centered Design principles.
• Experience on web analytics and feedback data to inform infrastructure changes and design.
• Experience on usability test - usability test script, method, collect feedback and design improvement.
• Detailed knowledge of Section 508 requirements, and experience designing interfaces to be 508 compliant.
• Demonstrated ability to generate innovative solutions to complex design problems.
• Solid background in defining and maintaining design standards.

Nice to Have

• Experience in unit testing and providing code coverage.
• Familiarity with version control systems (GitLab preferred) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working within a micro‑service architecture.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms and services (e.g., Azure, AWS, etc).
• Familiarity with DevOps practices and tools.
• Understanding of Agile methodologies.

Communication and Organizational

• Excellent presentation and communication (oral and written) skills.
• Consultant mindset with the ability to work with high level customer stakeholders and build excellent customer relationship.
• Experience identifying and applying industry tools, solutions, methods best practices, and emerging technologies.
• Strong analytical skills and problem‑solving skills with the ability to formulate and communicate recommendations for improvement.
• Experienced with process design and documentation methodologies, and design and production of quality deliverables, process and use case modeling, business case development.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively, independently, and as part of a team.
• Strong project management, leadership & meeting facilitation skill with knowledge of Project Life Cycle.

Compensation and Benefits

The likely salary range for this position is $134,514 - $172,500. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.

Our benefits package for all US‑based employees includes a variety of medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts, dental plan options, a vision plan, and a 401(k) plan offering the ability to contribute both pre and post‑tax dollars up to the IRS annual limits and receive a company match. To encourage work/life balance, GDIT offers employees full flex work weeks where possible and a variety of paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental, military, bereavement and jury duty leave. GDIT typically provides new employees with 15 days of paid leave per calendar year to be used for vacations, personal business, and illness and an additional 10 paid holidays per year. Paid leave and paid holidays are prorate]]> <