Manager, Forward Deployed UX Designer

Air•Pittsburgh, PA

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 involves substantial customer engagement at depots, factories, program offices, operational settings, sustainment facilities, and partner locations. The manager and team co-create solutions, validate design decisions in real work environments, and translate customer understanding into product direction and AI-native solutions. The position owns end-to-end discovery across multiple critical deployments, from framing questions through delivering insights that guide product delivery. The manager will build a system that helps forward-deployed teams create innovations at the edge and integrate them into Air’s core platform through a cycle of mission discovery, prototyping, shipping, measuring, and improving. This is a collaborative, fast-paced, customer-facing role that partners with forward-deployed engineering, data, go-to-market, and core platform teams. The role is full-time and may be based in Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; or remotely. It requires up to 50% travel to customer sites, operational settings, and partner locations. U.S. citizenship is required.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship.
At least 6 years of experience in product design, including at least 1 year leading or mentoring designers as a manager or lead.
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 unfamiliar technical domains and turning that work into a shipped product.
Hands-on fluency with AI, including designing for agentic or model-driven products and understanding how they fail.
Deep grounding in research and human-computer interaction (HCI).
Experience in high-growth environments where structure was built without slowing the team down.

Nice To Haves

Current U.S. security clearance or 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 experience for deployments and connect it to customer readiness and Air’s ability to win and retain accounts.
Apply and help refine principles that guide design decisions and create a coherent product experience.
Identify critical workflows across deployments, make them measurable, and provide synthetic insights that enrich the core platform.
Work with forward-deployed engineering and data partners to ensure the product represents real constraints, opportunities, and solutions.
Help define and field-test patterns for human–AI collaboration in agentic workflows, including what the system does, recommends, or requires a person to approve, and how users assess trust.
Contribute to a scalable design system and interaction language that teams adopt to work faster.
Lead forward-deployed UX designers at customer sites, combining field observation with evaluative testing in operational settings and using findings to inform product and design decisions.
Align forward-deployed roles, go-to-market, and core platform roles when priorities compete, turning differing mental models into a shared direction.
Help recruit, mentor, and develop forward-deployed UX designers.
Encourage AI-native ways of working, including prototyping in code, working directly with models, and shortening the path from idea to user feedback.
Contribute to a culture of craft, collaboration, and candor.