UI/UX Designer with Security Clearance

UI/UX Designer Location: Pasadena, CA (Hybrid) – On site one day per week at NASA JPL 91109
Clearance: Public Trust or higher

• *Must be a US Citizen Compensation: 95K – 100K + bonus

Position Overview: Our client’s organization builds the software that NASA’s aeronautics community uses to explore test data, forecasts, financials, and operational data. These are data-heavy analytics applications, and this role exists to make that data usable: designing the interfaces (dashboards, data tables, charts, and data-exploration workflows) through which people work with it. This is the founding UX/UI design role on the team: the person who stands up the design practice from the ground up. There is no design system, persona set, or research foundation in place today, so this designer creates them, and owns how people interact with the applications end to end, from research and personas through a reusable design system and production-ready designs.

Responsibilities: • Design system: create the team’s design system from scratch (components, patterns, standards, and documentation), and grow and maintain it as the source of truth for the team’s UI.

• Research and personas: define the team’s user personas from the ground up; plan and run user research, and turn findings into design decisions the team can act on.
• Data-heavy UI design: produce high-fidelity prototypes and production-ready designs for analytics applications such as dashboards, data tables, charts, data visualization, and complex data-exploration workflows.
• Data visualization: make complex, technical data clear and usable, choosing the right representations for the data and the audience.
• UX and analysis: produce user flows, wireframes, and other UX deliverables; present and defend design decisions to the team and stakeholders.
• Standards and practice: establish the team’s design process, standards, and tooling, and set the bar for design quality across the applications.
• Technical Collaboration: Work closely with engineers, data scientists, analysts, and program staff to turn requirements into usable software. Experience working directly with developers through implementation and deployment is required.
• Information Architecture: Strong experience organizing and structuring complex technical data • Data-Driven Design: Candidates must have experience using analytics, user research, and testing results to guide design decisions.
• AI Tools: Hands-on experience using AI tools within the UX/UI design process is now required.

Qualifications: Required: • Bachelor’s degree in design, human-computer interaction, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• Minimum of 5 years of experience UI/UX design and responsibilities described above.
• Demonstrated experience where the primary body of work is designing data-heavy, analytics-focused products such as dashboards, data tables, charts, data visualization, and data-exploration workflows. A portfolio centered on marketing sites, content pages, or general web design does not meet this requirement.
• Demonstrated strength in data visualization: representing complex or technical data clearly.
• Proficiency in Figma.
• Demonstrated experience creating a design system from the ground up, not just working within an existing one.
• Demonstrated experience defining personas and running user research to drive design.
• Strong attention to detail and clear design reasoning, with the ability to own design decisions independently.

Desired: • Enough data literacy to understand data structures and sources and design interfaces that fit the data, without being a data analyst or data scientist.

• Comfort learning technical or scientific domain concepts and their constraints.
• Designing data catalogs or discovery tools, working with cloud-based applications, and designing for technical or scientific users.