Consultant, User Experience: Cognitive Systems

Nationwide•Columbus, OH

19h•$108,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Nationwide is building a durable, enterprise practice for how people and AI work together responsibly. As AI moves from assisting to acting — from answering questions to taking multi-step action across our tools, endpoints, and business processes — we need someone who can design the human-AI systems that keep judgment, oversight, and accountability firmly in human hands. The Cognitive Systems Engineer sets the standards for Human-AI Teaming (HAT) and the governance controls that make AI adoption safe, effective, and scalable. This is an experienced individual-contributor consultative role. Alongside setting standards, you will remain hands-on — doing project work directly, applying HAT and governance methods on live initiatives so the standards stay grounded in real practice. You will define how we design, test, and evaluate human-AI systems; mentor practitioners and people leaders; and partner across UX, Technology, AI Risk, and platform teams. You will be positioned to co-own — and over time own — a core enterprise capability, reducing the organization's dependence on any single expert and making responsible AI a repeatable discipline rather than a heroic effort.

Requirements

5+ years of relevant experience in cognitive systems engineering, human factors, human-systems integration, UX research/design, human-AI interaction, or a closely related discipline — with demonstrated senior/lead impact.
Expertise in designing human-machine or human-AI systems where human oversight, decision-making, and accountability are central.
Strong grounding in how modern AI systems (LLMs, AI agents) actually work, their behaviors, and their failure modes — enough to reason about risk and oversight rather than only use the tools.
Proven ability to create standards, frameworks, and rubrics that others adopt, and to raise the quality of work across a team or organization.
Experience translating governance, risk, or compliance requirements into practical controls and workflows.
Excellent facilitation, coaching, and written communication skills, including the ability to make complex concepts clear to non-technical leaders.
Demonstrated ability to mentor others and build shared ownership rather than becoming the single point of dependency.
Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.
Typically, five or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
Comfortable speaking publicly to large groups and explaining design rationale to other parts of the business.
Solid, working understanding of UX principles and the human-centered design process.
Able to leverage data to make informed design decisions.
Ability to navigate multiple partner groups and tell compelling narratives.
Owns work with little oversight.
Independently and proactively seeks out answers as needed.
Can provide oversight for a single project or multiple projects.
Acts as a source of expertise for direction, mentoring and guidance for less experienced team members.
Works with development team to resolve technically complex issues requiring alignment across multiple business partners and subject areas.
Ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative information and external factors that may influence or have an impact on the company as well as the customers, distribution systems, operations, and strategy.
Proven ability to set work priorities that conform with established objectives, timeframes and accomplish a task in the most effective manner.
Ability to work in partnership with cross-functional teams (e.g., engineers, product managers, designers, business leaders, etc.).
Understand and make progress toward the company’s consumer performance indicator (CPI) and key performance indicator (KPI) goals.
Proven ability to manage projects and define administrative methods and procedures to attain objectives.

Nice To Haves

Background in cognitive systems engineering, cognitive science, human factors, decision science, or applied experimental psychology.
Experience with AI governance, model risk management, threat/red-team testing, or responsible-AI programs.
Familiarity with decision modeling and structured approaches to reasoning under uncertainty.
Experience in a regulated industry such as financial services or insurance.
Experience designing enablement, training, or upskilling programs at scale.

Responsibilities

Set the standard for Human-AI Teaming
Establish shared quality criteria for HAT work — evaluating systems against the qualities of being aligned, understandable, controllable, and resilient.
Design coordination patterns that make explicit how authority, proactivity, input, and output are divided between humans and AI, and how the level of AI authority and initiative changes the way the team must communicate and stay coordinated.
Frame problems around the decision to be made and the human oversight required, rather than the tool or model.
Embed governance and controls
Translate enterprise AI governance expectations into practical, usable controls, guardrails, and review practices that teams can apply in planning, development, and production.
Define control objectives for meaningful human judgment, safe handoffs, failure modes and fallback paths, attribution, and kill-switch / intervention decision rights for increasingly autonomous agents.
Extend a platform-agnostic control set across agentic platforms and endpoints, clarifying what platform owners, risk partners, and product teams each own.
Partner with AI Risk, Information Risk Governance, model risk management, and security on threat testing and pre-release readiness for AI agents — including agents built by citizen developers.
Build capability in others (reduce single-threaded dependency)
Mentor and coach UX practitioners, engineers, and people leaders, moving them from awareness into advanced, routine HAT execution: problem scoping, prompt shaping with decision context, coordination-pattern design, and review against HAT principles.
Create reusable frameworks, job aids, and enablement so responsible AI practices are embedded in everyday work rather than dependent on individual experts.
Do the work on live projects
Apply HAT and governance methods directly on active projects — scoping problems, shaping decision-context prompts, designing and reviewing coordination patterns, and evaluating systems against the four qualities.
Partner hands-on with practitioners and citizen developers on real AI and AI-agent work, including heuristic evaluation and threat-testing readiness, rather than advising only from the sidelines.
Use project work as a proving ground for the standards, surfacing gaps and improving the frameworks based on what real delivery demands.
Advise and influence
Serve as a trusted advisor to leadership on where HAT should be in scope, what strong outputs look like, and how to improve funding and readiness conversations.
Translate complex human-AI and governance concepts into clear, practical guidance for both leaders and practitioners.
Represent human-AI teaming in cross-functional forums such as AI review and red-team discussions, endpoint-agent pilots, and platform control design.
Consults and collaborates with stakeholders, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company to provide strategic, creative and technical direction.
Advocates for empathetic, human-centered design. Helps mitigate risk by pursuing work based on insights and an understanding of our users.
Problem solves, thinks big, influences and explores divergent ideas while understanding how to converge and build iteratively towards the best solution.
Designs and recommends innovative multi-platform solutions that balance customer needs with business viability and technical feasibility.
Participates in and facilitates idea-generating sessions evaluating those ideas with regards to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.
Able to think strategically and connect your work to a larger picture. Helps everyone consider the end-to-end experience and connect the dots.
Mentors and guides the team in their craft and profession to continually uplift the quality of our work.
Perceive rapid advancements in technology and how customers expect to interact with our company.
May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Benefits

medical/dental/vision
life insurance
short and long term disability coverage
paid time off with newly hired associates receiving a minimum of 18 days paid time off each full calendar year pro-rated quarterly based on hire date
nine paid holidays
8 hours of Lifetime paid time off
8 hours of Unity Day paid time off
401(k) with company match
company-paid pension plan
business casual attire