Product Designer

Find•Herndon, VA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Product Designer designs, evaluates, and iterates on new product ideas intended to support product growth, expansion, and revenue growth for Exostar’s Aerospace and Defense network and adjacent opportunities. The designer works in short cycles with a discovery Product Manager and Engineer, creating designs that let customers react to real product experiences before development begins. The role serves buyers and suppliers with different needs, including customers who are experts in complex, regulated workflows and those with limited experience in the same environment. It is suited to a designer comfortable working in early-stage, high-uncertainty conditions. The role includes researching customer workflows; designing two-sided network experiences such as onboarding, supplier profiles, search, and trust signals; rapidly prototyping and testing ideas; simplifying complex compliance, qualification, and sourcing workflows; and designing low-friction product-led growth experiences. The designer uses AI to support research synthesis, prototyping, and design variations, and designs AI-enabled experiences that explain results and keep a human in the loop. The role also requires attention to accessibility and security in regulated environments, adherence to Exostar’s design system and brand standards, preparation of materials for gate reviews, and handoff of validated designs to product and engineering teams. The position is hybrid, three days per week, in Herndon, Virginia, or Cincinnati, Ohio. The stated pay range is $130,000–$150,000 per year, with final compensation dependent on experience, skills, qualifications, and location. Exostar describes its cloud-based platforms as enabling secure collaboration and compliant operations in highly regulated industries, including Aerospace and Defense and Life Sciences.

Requirements

At least 6 years of product design experience in B2B SaaS, with a portfolio showing end-to-end work on complex products.
Experience designing a two-sided marketplace or network product with different user types on each side.
Strong user research and usability testing skills.
Fluency with modern design and prototyping tools, such as Figma.
Experience designing enterprise workflows with multiple roles, permissions, and approval steps.
Ability to work in short cycles and make design decisions with limited information.
Clear communication with product managers, engineers, and executives.

Nice To Haves

Experience with enterprise workflow products, such as supply chain systems for sourcing, procurement, supplier management, order and shipment management, demand planning, or supply chain visibility.
Experience in compliance, security, or other regulated product environments.
Familiarity with WCAG accessibility standards.
Experience building or extending a design system.
Curiosity about how customers work and comfort spending time with them.
Willingness to discard work when testing shows it is wrong.
Collaborative approach and comfort working closely with a small team.
Directness about trade-offs between speed and polish.

Responsibilities

Participate in customer interviews, experiments, and usability sessions, and develop an understanding of how buyers and suppliers work.
Map buyer and supplier journeys and workflows, and design experiences for both sides of the network, including onboarding, supplier profiles, search, and trust signals.
Produce prototypes quickly, from low-fidelity sketches to clickable prototypes, and collaborate with the prototype engineer on coded prototypes when needed.
Plan and conduct customer usability tests and translate findings into design changes within days.
Use AI to accelerate research synthesis, prototyping, and design variations; design AI-enabled experiences that explain results and keep a human in the loop.
Simplify complex compliance, qualification, and sourcing workflows so companies new to defense can navigate them without extensive handholding.
Design intuitive, low-friction experiences that support self-service onboarding, activation, adoption, and expansion, using customer insights and behavioral data to optimize product-led growth across the B2B SaaS lifecycle.
Design for accessibility and the security expectations of a regulated environment.
Follow Exostar’s design system and brand standards, and identify where the system needs to change for new products.
Prepare design materials for gate reviews and hand validated designs to product and engineering teams for scaling.