Manager, Forward Deployed UX Designer

Air•San Francisco, VA

About The Position

Air is hiring a Manager of Forward Deployed UX Designers to lead a newly created team that embeds with customers in the field to understand their missions and how they evaluate continuous readiness. The role is customer-facing and highly collaborative, with significant time spent at depots, factories, program offices, operational settings, sustainment facilities, and partner locations co-creating solutions and validating design decisions where the work happens. The manager owns end-to-end discovery across multiple critical deployments, from framing questions to delivering insights that guide product decisions, and partners with other forward-deployed roles to develop AI-native solutions. The manager connects customer workflows and readiness needs to product direction and business outcomes. They help establish a scalable system for field teams to innovate and integrate their work into Air’s core platform, following a cycle of mission discovery, prototyping, shipping, measuring, and improving the platform. They shape product experience and design principles, identify and measure critical workflows, and help define human–AI collaboration patterns, including what AI does independently, what it recommends, what people approve, and how users assess trust. They also contribute to a scalable design system and interaction language. The role includes leading, recruiting, mentoring, and developing forward-deployed UX designers; working closely with engineering, data, go-to-market, and core platform teams; and fostering a culture of craft, collaboration, and candor. The team is encouraged to work in an AI-native way, including prototyping in code and working directly with models. U.S. citizenship is required. This is a full-time position based out of Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; or remote, with up to 50% travel to customer sites, operational settings, and partner locations.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship.
At least 6 years of product design experience, including at least 1 year leading or mentoring designers as a manager or lead.
A track record of design shaping product and business outcomes in complex enterprise, analytics, or AI-native software.
Systems thinking across products and workflows, such as service design, multi-product consistency, or workflows spanning organizations.
Experience co-creating with domain experts and stakeholders in technical domains and translating that work into a shipped product.
Hands-on fluency with AI, including designing for agentic or model-driven products and understanding how they fail.
Strong grounding in research and human-computer interaction (HCI).
Experience in high-growth environments and building structure without slowing teams down.

Nice To Haves

Current U.S. security clearance, or the ability to obtain one with company sponsorship.
Experience designing for defense, government, or the public sector.
Background in supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or industrial operations.

Responsibilities

Own the product experience for deployments and connect it to customer readiness and Air’s ability to win and retain accounts.
Apply and refine design principles to create a coherent product experience.
Identify critical workflows across deployments, make them measurable, and provide synthetic data that enriches the core platform.
Partner with forward-deployed engineering and data teams to ensure the product represents real constraints, opportunities, and solutions.
Help define and test patterns for human–AI collaboration in agentic workflows, including system actions, recommendations, human approvals, and trust signals.
Contribute to a design system and interaction language that can scale across products and help teams work faster.
Lead forward-deployed UX designers at customer sites, combining field observation with evaluative testing in operational settings.
Use field research to inform product and design decisions.
Align with forward-deployed colleagues, go-to-market teams, and core platform teams when priorities compete, and establish a shared picture for the team to build against.
Help recruit, mentor, and develop forward-deployed UX designers.
Encourage AI-native design practices, including prototyping in code, working directly with models, and shortening the path from ideas to user feedback.
Contribute to a culture of craft, collaboration, and candor.