Principal UX Designer

Aspida Financial Services LLC•Durham, NC

11d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal UX Designer is a hybrid senior-design and people-management role. The position leads high-impact, ambiguous design strategy as a hands-on individual contributor while managing and developing designers who conduct both design and research for their product areas. The role shapes experience architecture and major design patterns across product lines and is accountable for team staffing, coaching, performance, design quality, and research quality. The team has no separate research-only role; each designer conducts user research, usability testing, and validation as part of their design work. The role is responsible for developing design-system maturity and consistency, influencing executive-level product and experience decisions, and leading complex portfolio-level journey design. It also establishes design-review, design-QA, and process standards; coaches designers on research methods; and creates lightweight research operations so research findings are rigorous, retained, and incorporated into product decisions. The Principal UX Designer defines the team's approach to AI across prototyping, research, and front-end design. This includes evaluating tools, guiding responsible use, protecting customer and research data, and helping the team validate working experiences faster. The position reports to the Sr. Director of Digital Product and is required to work onsite at the Durham office three days per week.

Requirements

15 or more years of experience in product design, including demonstrated strategic design leadership at the portfolio or multi-product level.
Prior experience managing, coaching, or formally mentoring other designers.
Ability to shape design systems, patterns, and standards used across multiple teams or product lines.
Strong executive communication skills and experience influencing product and business decisions at a senior level.
Ability to balance hands-on design work with people-management responsibilities.
Strong working knowledge of research methods, ethics, and synthesis, and ability to coach designers who conduct their own research.
Familiarity with AI-assisted tools across prototyping, research synthesis, and design-to-code workflows, and judgment to evaluate which tools are worth adopting.
Experience with Figma, Storybook, Claude Design, Pendo, Lyssna, or equivalent tools.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or maturing a design team from the ground up.
Experience operating as a design manager and senior individual contributor simultaneously, or transitioning between the two.
Familiarity with design operations, design-review processes, and design-QA standards.
Experience partnering with Product, Research, and Engineering leadership on roadmap and experience strategy.
Comfort operating in ambiguity and judgment about when to lead through direct design work versus through the team.
Experience building or maturing lightweight research practices within a design team, including research operations, repositories, and standards.
Background as a hands-on designer-researcher, with firsthand experience balancing design execution and research in the same role.
Hands-on experience with AI-powered prototyping tools, AI-assisted research or synthesis tools, or design-to-code platforms.
Experience leading a team through adoption of new tools or workflows, including change management and training.

Responsibilities

Lead ambiguous, high-impact design strategy across product lines.
Shape experience architecture and define major design patterns used across the design system.
Drive design-system maturity and consistency across product areas.
Influence executive-level product and experience decisions through strategic design thinking.
Lead complex, portfolio-level journey design when the problem space is not yet well defined.
Manage designers, including staffing, performance input, coaching, and career development.
Own design quality and delivery alignment across the team's work.
Create and maintain standards for design reviews, design QA, and design processes.
Balance team workload across craft development, delivery commitments, and team health.
Act as the primary people manager and escalation point for the design team.
Coach designers on research methods, study design, and synthesis.
Set research and validation priorities with Product so designers focus limited research time on high-impact questions.
Own research quality and rigor, including consistency of methods, synthesis standards, and the shared research repository.
Ensure research findings are integrated into design and product decisions.
Build lightweight research operations, including templates, consent and ethics standards, and participant-recruiting processes.
Balance designers' time between design execution and research responsibilities, and flag when research needs exceed the team's capacity.
Define and drive the team's strategy for adopting AI tools and workflows across prototyping, research, and front-end design.
Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted prototyping tools to speed concept iteration and create testable designs sooner.
Guide designers in using AI for research tasks while maintaining research rigor and data privacy standards.
Champion AI-assisted front-end development workflows, such as design-to-code tools, to shorten handoffs and validate working experiences faster.
Set guidelines for responsible AI use, including human review of AI output and appropriate use of customer and research data.
Stay current on AI tools and recommend capabilities as they mature.