Director, Inclusive Design & Accessibility

Unum • Portland, ME

2d • $109,100 - $224,000 • Onsite

About The Position

The Director, Inclusive Design & Accessibility leads a centralized UX design practice and owns the enterprise capability for inclusive design and digital accessibility. The role combines people leadership with standards, governance, education, tooling, and cross-functional influence to embed accessible, user-centered practices throughout the software development lifecycle. This is a campus-based, onsite position.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant experience in UX, design, technology, engineering, business, or a related field.
• Typically, 10 or more years of progressive experience in UX, digital product development, accessibility, or related disciplines, including people leadership.
• Demonstrated experience developing talent, planning capacity, assigning work, and building design capability in a complex organization.
• Deep working knowledge of WCAG and ability to translate success criteria into practical design, content, engineering, and testing expectations.
• Working knowledge of ADA, Section 508, and related U.S. accessibility requirements, with judgment about when to engage Legal and Compliance.
• Hands-on familiarity with assistive technologies and evaluation methods, including screen readers, keyboard operation, magnification, voice input, automated checks, and manual testing.
• Expertise in user-centered design, interaction design, information architecture, prototyping, usability evaluation, design critique, and design systems.
• Experience integrating UX and accessibility into Agile product delivery with Product, Engineering, Quality, and business partners.
• Strong coaching, facilitation, executive communication, influence, change leadership, prioritization, and conflict-resolution skills.

Nice To Haves

• Accessibility credential such as IAAP CPACC, WAS, or CPWA, or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
• Experience establishing enterprise accessibility governance, operating models, reusable frameworks, or maturity improvements.
• Experience in insurance, financial services, healthcare, or another regulated industry.

Responsibilities

• Manage, coach, and develop UX designers through performance management, career development, succession planning, and ongoing feedback.
• Align assignments, capacity, and skills with product priorities, and identify staffing and capability gaps.
• Set expectations for design quality, inclusive design, user-centered methods, documentation, collaboration, and professional practice.
• Provide design leadership across digital products, balancing user needs, business outcomes, usability, and accessibility.
• Build an inclusive, psychologically safe culture of learning, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Champion diverse user needs, contexts, abilities, and barriers from discovery through production.
• Establish practices for research collaboration, usability evaluation, accessible annotations, design-system use, and cross-functional handoffs.
• Guide teams in applying inclusive design and accessibility to interactions, information architecture, content, prototypes, and production experiences.
• Connect user evidence, accessibility needs, business outcomes, technical feasibility, and risk in stakeholder recommendations.
• Define accessibility practices across planning, discovery, requirements, design, development, testing, release, and monitoring.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Quality, DevOps, Risk, Legal, and Compliance to embed requirements, acceptance criteria, checkpoints, and verification.
• Create scalable templates, checklists, annotations, definitions of done, review practices, and escalation paths.
• Promote early engagement and shift-left practices that prevent barriers and reduce avoidable production defects.
• Clarify shared accountability while delivery leaders retain responsibility for implementation, testing, remediation, and release.
• Establish accessibility standards aligned with organizational commitments, applicable requirements, and recognized guidelines.
• Serve as a senior subject matter expert for WCAG conformance, assistive technology compatibility, accessible patterns, and digital barriers.
• Curate approved resources and tooling for design review, code analysis, manual evaluation, assistive technology testing, validation, and monitoring.
• Partner with governance bodies and leaders to identify risk, support escalation, prioritize improvements, and incorporate expert and user feedback.
• Build role-based learning, coaching, office hours, champion networks, and reusable guidance.
• Measure adoption, capability, quality, defect trends, risk, and process effectiveness, and maintain an improvement roadmap.

Benefits

• Onsite fitness facilities
• Paid time off
• Employee professional development programs
• Healthcare benefits, including health, vision, and dental
• Short- and long-term disability insurance benefits
• Performance-based incentive plans
• 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match up to 5% and an additional 4.5% contribution whether or not the employee contributes

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director