Sr Conversation Designer

United; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 90,000 - 117,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Parental leave

Employee assistance program

Commuter benefits

401(k) and flight privileges

Job summary

United Airlines seeks a Conversation Designer to own the UX architecture, linguistic logic, and multi-turn dialogue flows across voice and digital channels. You will translate complex policies into simple, empathetic interactions and guide customers to resolution with minimal escalation.

You will collaborate with product managers to optimize NLU models, craft prompts, and design graceful hand-offs to live agents, ensuring a consistent brand voice across channels.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or related experience.
• Linguistics, cognitive science, HCI, or related field focusing on language structure and human behavior.
• 2+ years designing conversational interfaces, automated voice systems, chat applications, or virtual assistant workflows.
• Ability to write clear, concise, and empathetic dialogue. Mastery of difference between writing for voice vs chat.
• High proficiency using visualization and design mapping tools to build complex, conditional flows.
• Expert knowledge of conversational repair sequences to guide a misunderstood customer.
• Deep understanding of cognitive limitations during automated service interactions.
• Familiarity with Generative AI concepts and prompts.
• Experience with AI platforms such as Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, NotebookLM.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.
• Successful interview required.
• Reliable, punctual attendance.

Responsibilities

• Architect, diagram, and design conversational interactions and flows for voice and digital channels.
• Ensure automated journeys achieve full resolution with high CSAT.
• Craft user-facing interactions consistent with the brand voice.
• Write optimized prompts for voice and chat channels.
• Partner with Product Managers to audit and optimize the NLU model.
• Review user utterances to design slot-filling and validation prompts.
• Design graceful hand-offs to live agents with preserved context.
• Conduct rigorous user testing and audit conversations.
• Identify language ambiguity or robotic phrasing that causes abandonment.
• Maintain enterprise Conversational Design Style Guide and design system pattern libraries.
• Stay ahead of trends in generative AI prompting and mentor junior associates.

Skills

Conversational design

UX writing

Prompt writing

Dialogue flow design

NLU awareness

Cognition & user behavior

Empathy in communication

Voice and chat writing

Generative AI concepts

Data-driven improvement

Education

Bachelor's degree

Cognitive science / linguistics

Tools

Copilot

ChatGPT

Gemini

Claude

Perplexity

NotebookLM

Power Automate

Copilot Studio

Zapier

n8n

Job description

Achieving our goals starts with supporting yours. Grow your career, access top-tier health and wellness benefits, build lasting connections with your team and our customers, and travel the world using our extensive route network.

Come join us to create what's next. Let's define tomorrow, together.

Description

Caring is one of United's most important principles. And no one exemplifies that more than our Customer Contact Center team, who helps our customers with everything from booking and managing reservations, to questions about their travel, MileagePlus accounts, and so much more! Are you a people person? Do you get fulfillment from helping others? Then join a team that cares for our customers and makes a positive impact on their travel experience, every single day.

Job Overview and Responsibilities

The Conversation Designer owns the user experience (UX) architecture, persona, and linguistic logic for all customer-facing automated channels arcorss voice, digital chat, and messaging. They will design intuitive, empathic, and highly structured multi-turn dialogue flows that guide customers seamlessly to full resolution without human intervention. By blending psychology, creative writing, and system logic, they will translate complex business policies and transactions into simple, conversational interactions that maximize resolution while managing error states and complex user inputs. They need to be customer-obsessed to create experiences that customers love to use.

• Architect, diagram, and design conversational interactions, logic trees, fallback behaviors, and state-machine flows for both voice and digital channels
• Should be low-effort paths for complex customer intents, ensuring automated journeys are structured to achieve full resolution within the channel with high CSAT
• Craft all user-facing interactions, ensuring automation tone, vocabulary, and personality are consistent with the brand voice
• Write optimized, natural prompts for voice and chat/messaging channels that are universally understood, concise, and inclusive
• Partner with Product Managers to continuously audit and optimize the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model
• Review real user utterances to design slot-filling parameters, synoyms, entity classifications, and validation prompts that prevent the automation from misunderstanding the customer
• Design conversational architecture for graceful human hand-offs including when to transition to a live agent, ensuring the customer feels supported and that all accumulated context is packaged cleanly for the receiving live agent to reduce the need for the customer to repeat information they've already shared
• Conduct rigorous user testing and audit conversations
• Identify when language ambiguity, robotic/awkward phrasing, or logic dead-ends cause customers to abandon automated paths or request a live representative prematurely
• Establish and maintain the enterprise Conversational Design Style Guide and design system pattern libraries
• Stay ahead of emerging design trends (such as generative AI prompting vs deterministic flows) and mentor piers and other junior associates across the organization

Qualifications

What's needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor's degree or related experience
• Linguistics, computational linguistics, congitive science, human-computer interaction (HCI), technical writing, creative writing, psychology, or related field focusing on language structure and human behavior
• Demonstrated conversational designs, flow diagrams, prompt copywriting variations, and measurable improvement in automation resolution or user completion rates
• 2+ years of hands-on experience designing conversational interfaces, automated voice systems, chat applications, or virtual assistant workflows
• Ability to write clear, concise, and empathetic dialogue. Mastery of fundamental difference between writing for voice(pacing, breathing, phrasing) vs writing for chat (mobile screens, chat UI, buttons, rich media)
• High proficiency using visualization and design mapping tools to build complex, conditional branching logic, user interruptions and non-linear paths
• Expert knowledge of how to design 'conversational repair' sequences (progressive re-prompting, slot-recovery, context management) to guide a misunderstood or confused customer back on track
• Deep understanding of human cognitive limitations during automated service interactions – knowing exactly how much information to give a user in a single turn to prevent frustration or abandonment
• Familiarity with Generative AI concepts and prompt writing
• Exposure to AI platforms such as Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and NotebookLM
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without sponsorship
• Successful completion of interview required to meet job qualification
• Reliable, punctual attendance is an essential function of the position

What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):

• Master's degree or related experience
• Advanced specialization in computational linguistics, HCI, or digital interaction design
• Certificate from conversational design institute or platform-specific conversational build certification
• 3+ Experience designing both voice/auditory user interfaces and written digital chat/messaging interfaces within a high volume contact center of customer service framework
• Understanding of how to design system prompts and dynamic response parameters for LLMs, blending standard deterministic (rule-based) scripts with flexible generative responses while maintaining strict guardrails
• Familiarity with designing experiences where a customer may be using voice and text simultaneously (e.g, viewing/interacting with a mobile screen while interacting with a smart voice assistant)
• Understanding of regional idioms, syntax variations, and slang patterns to ensure conversational models remain highly inclusive and accurate across divers customer demographics
• Hands-on experience using AI tools in projects, internships, or work environment.
• Knowledge of automation platforms such as Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Zapier, or n8n

The base pay range for this role is $89,965.00 to $117,212.00.

The base salary range/hourly rate listed is dependent on job-related, factors such as experience, education, and skills. This position is also eligible for bonus and/or long-term incentive compensation awards.

You may be eligible for the following competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, life, accident & disability, parental leave, employee assistance program, commuter, paid holidays, paid time off, 401(k) and flight privileges.

United Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We recruit, employ, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected category under applicable law. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. To request an accommodation, contact [e-mail]