Design Lead - Senior chez Careers

Description

RDTS is seeking a Senior User Experience Designer to support a program with the State of Maryland in Linthicum, MD. The position is fully onsite and full-time, Monday-Friday with standard office hours (i.e. 8:00am-5:00pm). 

We are specifically seeking a highly skilled and strategic Design Lead to own and evolve the user experience of our web-based application. This role will lead a small team of UX/UI designers, collaborate closely with product and engineering teams, and drive the design vision from discovery through delivery. This role will play a key role in shaping the look, feel, and functionality of our platform, ensuring it's both user friendly and visually compelling. 

This lead designer shall bring best practices in human centered design to support initiatives across the state to holistically improve users’ end-to-end experiences with state services. The role shall be a champion for user needs and guide designers, researchers, content strategists as well as technical teams on projects with state agencies. This individual shall engage with stakeholders across organizations in order to build customer understanding, solve challenging problems, and empower teams to collaboratively develop metrics, measuring results, and integrate new methodologies optimizing customer experience and program performance.  

Responsibilities include:

• Lead the end-to-end design process across the web application, from research to final visual design and delivery
• Define and execute the product design strategy in collaboration with product, engineering and leadership teams
• Mentor and guide a team of UX/UI designers, ensuring high design quality and professional growth
• Advocate for user needs through research, testing, and feedback loops
• Create wireframes, user flows, prototypes, and high-fidelity UI designs
• Develop and maintain a scalable design system and UI component Library
• Collaborate with developers to ensure accurate implementation of design solutions
• Ensure design consistency, usability, accessibility (WCAG) and responsiveness across all devices
• Use analytics and user data to continuously improve the user experience
• Present design work to stakeholders, clearly articulating rationale and user value
• Communicate user research findings and insights through appropriate artifacts including personas, journey maps, wireframes and prototypes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university. Five (5) years of equivalent experience in a related field may be substituted for the Bachelor’s degree. 
• Candidate must have a minimum of five (5) years of experience in user experience and service design. 
• A strong portfolio demonstrating UX and UI design for responsive web applications
• Proficiency in modern design tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch or similar
• Deep understanding of web design principles, usability, responsive design, and accessibility standards
• Solid experience with user research methods, usability testing, and design validation
• Ability to guide and influence product decisions through design thinking
• Strong leadership and mentoring capabilities
• Excellent Communication and presentation skills
• High attention to detail and a passion for clean, intuitive design
• Empathy for users and a collaborative Mindset

Specialized Experience: Candidate should have experience planning and facilitating workshops, meetings and/or other interactive sessions in order to gather feedback and insight from key customers and stakeholders to determine operational needs and changes to the program. Additional experience includes:

• Experience designing for enterprise applications or dashboards
• Familiarity with front-end frameworks (Angular), and design handoff tools (like Figma Dev Mode)
• Knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1) and inclusive design principles
• Familiarity with design tokens, versioning, and handoff tools, (e.g., Figma Dev Mode)

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, or other legally protected status.