Manager, Forward Deployed UX Designer

Air; Arlington, Pittsburgh, San Francisco (VA, Allegheny County, CA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Air, a leader in Enterprise Readiness, seeks a Manager of Forward Deployed UX Designers to lead a newly created team embedded with customers in the field. You will scope, design, and validate AI-native solutions across deployments—from depots to program offices—driving a 10x improvement in readiness and customer outcomes.

Based in the Arlington, VA area with travel up to 50% to customer sites, you will hire and mentor designers, define patterns for human–AI collaboration, and ensure the work

Qualifications

• 6+ years in product design and a track record of shaping product and business outcomes in complex enterprise/AI-native software.
• Experience leading or mentoring designers (as a manager or lead).
• Ability to think across products and workflows (service design, multi-product consistency).
• Experience co-creating with domain experts and stakeholders and turning work into a shipped product.
• Hands-on fluency with AI, including designing for agentic or model-driven products and understanding failure modes.
• Strong grounding in research and human–computer interaction (HCI).
• Experience building structure in high-growth environments without slowing the team.

Responsibilities

• Shape the product experience across deployments and connect it to how customers reach readiness and how Air wins and keeps accounts.
• Design the system, not just the screens; work with engineering and data partners to reveal real constraints and opportunities.
• Co-create with field teams to align priorities and turn mental models into a shared product picture.
• Grow the team by recruiting, mentoring, and developing forward-deployed UX designers; push toward AI-native ways of working.

Skills

Product design

Team leadership

Systems thinking

AI fluency

User research

HCI knowledge

Job description

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
• 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.