Manager, Forward Deployed UX Designer

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 brings development, production, delivery, and sustainment into a single 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 a Manager of Forward Deployed UX Designers, you will lead a newly created team that embeds directly with our customers in the field to understand in detail their mission and how they evaluate continuous readiness. You'll spend significant time with customers as well—at depots, factories, program offices, and operational settings—co-creating solutions and validating design decisions where the work actually happens. Together with your team, you turn this understanding into a product direction and work with other forward-deployed roles to design and develop innovative AI-native solutions to create a 10x better way of satisfying customer needs, instantly. As a manager, you will need to scale a system that enables the forward-deployed teams to create mesmerizing innovation on the edge and integrate the work back to the core platform to complete the full cycle: Mission discovery → Prototype → Ship → Measure → Improve the Platform. This is a highly collaborative, fast-paced, customer-facing role where you own the discovery work end-to-end across multiple critical deployments—from framing the question to delivering insights that direct what we deliver. You’ll partner with other forward-deployed leadership roles to

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

This role requires up to 50% travel to customer sites, operational settings, and partner locations.

Scope of Responsibilities

Shape the product experience

• Own the experience for your deployments and connect it to how customers reach readiness, and to how Air wins and keeps accounts.
• Apply and help refine the principles that guide design decisions, so hundreds of small calls add up to one coherent product experience.
• Identify the critical workflows across your deployments, make them measurable, and provide synthetic that enriches the core.

Design the system, not just the screens

• Work with forward-deployed engineering and data partners so the product shows real constraints, opportunities, and solutions.
• Help define the patterns for human–AI collaboration in agentic workflows and test them out directly in the field. That means what the system does on its own, what it recommends, what a person must approve, and how people know when to trust it.
• Contribute to 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

• Lead forward-deployed UX designers at customer sites—depots, factories, program offices, and sustainment facilities—pairing field observation with evaluative testing in real operational settings, and use it to inform product as well as design decisions.
• Drive alignment with other forward-deployed roles, go-to-market, and core platform roles when priorities compete. Turn competing mental models into a shared picture your team can build against.

Grow the team and your craft

• Help recruit, mentor, and develop forward-deployed UX designers
• Push your team toward an AI-native way of working: prototyping in code, working directly with models, and shortening the path from idea to something users can react to.
• Contribute to a culture of craft, collaboration, and candor.

Qualifications

• U.S. Citizenship is required

Required Skills:

• 6+ years in product design, including 1+ year leading or mentoring designers (as a manager or lead).
• A track record of design shaping product and business outcomes in complex enterprise, analytics, or AI-native software.
• Systems thinking across products and workflows, such as service design, multi-product consistency, or workflows that span organizations.
• Experience co-creating with domain experts and stakeholders 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
• Experience designing for defense, government, or public sector
• 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.