Product Designer (1099 Contract) | Active Secret Clearance Required

Role overview

Own end-to-end product design for software that helps people understand and respond to complex operational challenges. You’ll work closely with engineers, product partners, subject-matter experts, and users to turn ambiguous needs into clear, information-rich interfaces and guide features from discovery through release. This is a hands-on contract role scheduled for 40 hours per week.

Responsibilities

- Lead design from problem framing and user flows through wireframes, detailed interfaces, and design quality checks. - Create clear experiences for dense data, maps, timelines, simulation results, and workflows used by people in different roles. - Build and maintain design system components, tokens, variants, and documentation in partnership with front-end engineers. - Conduct lightweight discovery with subject-matter experts and end users, and turn findings into useful team artifacts. - Design access, permissions, authentication, empty and error states, and interactions that support audit needs. - Present design decisions, take part in critique, and build alignment with technical and nontechnical partners. - Treat accessibility as a core requirement, including WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508.

Requirements

- Four to five years of experience shipping product designs, with a portfolio showing process and decision-making. - Strong Figma skills, including components, variants, auto layout, and variables. - Practical experience creating and maintaining a design system, including tokens, component APIs, documentation, version changes, and alignment with code. - Experience designing complex, information-dense enterprise, analytics, logistics, or operational software. - Working knowledge of front-end concepts such as component structure, state, responsive behavior, and design tokens. - Experience applying research, discovery, or competitive analysis to product decisions. - Strong collaboration, stakeholder communication, and presentation skills; able to explain trade-offs and work independently. - Active Secret clearance and U.S. citizenship.

Nice to have

- Clearance above Secret; experience in defense, government, regulated, or compliance-heavy products. - Contributions to front-end or design system code, especially with React, TypeScript, or CSS. - Familiarity with map interfaces, scheduling and timeline views, simulation tools, classified or air-gapped settings, or FedRAMP and IL5 constraints.

Benefits and work setup

This is a 1099 independent contractor engagement. Compensation depends on experience, qualifications, scope, and expected effort.