Head of Accessibility Engineering & Standards

Guardian Life Insurance•New York, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Guardian’s Accessibility Centre of Excellence is chartered to be proactive, authoritative, and forward-looking — not a late-stage audit function. This role owns enterprise digital accessibility standards and governance across all surfaces, with cross-org authority that extends beyond org boundaries. Both strategic and deeply technical, this leader influences design, engineering, and governance decisions at the point where they are made — not after they ship. As Guardian builds AI-native experiences, the standards for agentic accessibility are still being written. The person in this role will help write them.

Requirements

Deep expertise in digital accessibility standards and web content guidelines — with a track record of governance and standards enforcement at enterprise scale, not just auditing.
Proven ability to embed accessibility into component architecture and design systems — making hard calls on breaking changes and ensuring conformance is foundational, not cosmetic.
Strong front-end accessibility architecture capability — experience reviewing and guiding component refactors, keyboard flow design, and assistive technology compatibility at the engineering level.
Confidence operating across governance and risk — conformance reviews, conditional approvals, product assessments, and communicating accessibility in terms of business risk and legal exposure to executive audiences.
A public presence in the accessibility community and genuine intellectual curiosity about the frontier — conversational and agentic accessibility, cognitive accessibility, and emerging regulatory frameworks.
Legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve enterprise digital accessibility standards — conformance requirements, governance, and continuous improvement across web, mobile, and agentic surfaces.
Lead the Accessibility Centre of Excellence as a governance function with real authority — release gates, conformance reviews, conditional approvals, third-party product gatekeeping, and exception governance.
Embed accessibility into the design system at the architecture level — ensuring conformance is built into components by default, not retrofitted after the fact.
Translate accessibility standards into clear, testable engineering requirements — focus behavior, keyboard navigation flows, assistive technology markup, error handling — that product engineers can implement without interpretation.
Guide front-end accessibility architecture — reviewing and directing refactors of existing components, decoupling interaction patterns that block keyboard and assistive technology users.
Set guardrails around AI usage and accessibility risk — defining standards for conversational interfaces, voice agents, and multimodal interactions where regulatory guidance is nascent.
Build and operationalize audit programs and tooling capability that accelerate accessibility adoption across the enterprise.
Uplift accessibility capability across product and design teams — through embedded consultation, standards documentation, and training that makes compliant implementation the path of least resistance.
Define and track success metrics — compliance rates, audit outcomes, legal exposure reduction — reported as enterprise capability indicators to senior leadership.
Build external visibility for Guardian’s accessibility practice — through publishing, speaking, and community engagement.