Staff Product Designer

DAT•Denver, CO

3h•$168,000 - $209,000•Hybrid

About The Position

DAT Freight & Analytics is looking for a Staff Product Designer to join the Product Design team, reporting to our Director of Product Design. In this role, you'll set design direction across multiple cross-functional product teams, shaping how carriers, brokers, and shippers experience DAT's suite of products at a scope that spans squads, not just a single one. This is a hands-on, high-ambiguity role for someone who's ready to own coherence and quality across a full product area, not just a feature. You'll be the person who steps in before a problem is fully scoped, resolves design debates that cross team lines, and builds the patterns other designers build on. You won't have direct reports, but you'll be expected to raise the level of everyone around you through your work, your critique, and your judgment. You'll bring deep UI craft and systems-level UX thinking to a collaborative team that values craft, curiosity, and outcomes. You'll be a design voice that Product, Engineering, and Research leaders turn to when a decision needs to hold up across the whole product, not just one corner of it.

Requirements

8-12+ years of experience in UX/UI design, product design, including demonstrated Staff/Lead-level scope.
A portfolio demonstrating strong design craft applied to complex digital products, with clear evidence of both UX thinking and UI quality across multiple teams or product areas.
Expert command of UX and UI fundamentals: information architecture, interaction design, visual design, layout, typography, color, and visual hierarchy.
Experience working across multiple cross-functional product teams alongside Product, Engineering, and Research partners, without formal management authority.
Demonstrated experience with experimentation, A/B testing frameworks, or data-informed design iteration.
Advanced proficiency in Figma, including organized component use, contribution to shared design libraries, and ownership of design system artifacts.
Demonstrable usage of AI in your design practice, with evidence of how you leverage AI for prototyping, testing, and shipping. — We'll ask you to show this, not just describe it.
A track record of mentoring peers effectively — providing structured feedback, setting a craft standard, and helping others develop their skills.
Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, with experience managing stakeholder alignment across teams and presenting to senior leadership.
Solid understanding of accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG) and inclusive design practices.

Responsibilities

Lead UX and UI design for a multi-team product area, owning coherence and quality across several cross-functional squads rather than a single one.
Take ambiguous, loosely-scoped problems — new market opportunities, cross-cutting workflow gaps, technical-debt-driven redesigns — and turn them into a clear design point of view before detailed execution starts.
Define the interaction models and design patterns that other designers on adjacent squads adopt; identify and close design-system gaps before they become inconsistent across the product.
Approach every project with a customer-centric mindset, a clear hypothesis, and a defined measure of success, at a scale where the hypothesis often spans multiple teams' roadmaps.
Serve as the go-to design authority across your product area, resolving pattern conflicts and design debates that a single squad can't settle on its own.
Ensure quality, accessibility, and visual consistency across your surfaces, upholding accessibility standards and championing inclusive design practices at a systems level.
Partner with Product, Data, and Research to frame design decisions around evidence; use analytics, user research, and qualitative feedback to consistently inform and refine your work.
Design, document, and support experiments and A/B tests, framing every design as a prototype that can be learned from and improved — including experiments that span more than one team's surface.
Track UX and business metrics relevant to your product area to demonstrate impact and proactively surface opportunities to improve.
Advocate for, and where needed personally lead, the research that de-risks major cross-team design decisions, working closely with UXR peers.
Work closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Research partners to bring experiences from concept through launch, ensuring expectations are clearly communicated across every team involved.
Lead communication across your workstreams, presenting complex, cross-team design decisions to senior stakeholders (VP/Director level) and connecting them to business outcomes.
Mentor senior and mid-level designers: unblock their hardest problems, give direct feedback on craft, and help them grow toward their next level.
Formalize or sharpen team rituals (design crits, discovery readouts, retrospectives) that improve the quality and culture of the design practice, not just your own team's.
Understand the goals behind the work, not just the request, and connect design decisions to business outcomes, user needs, and company-level objectives.
Bring design perspective into roadmap conversations early, proposing design-led framing before a problem is fully scoped by Product.
Anticipate interdependencies across teams and initiatives, and surface roadblocks before they require escalation.
Use AI as a meaningful part of your design workflow, improving execution, iteration, and problem-solving, while modeling effective and principled AI use for others on the team.
Pragmatically apply design process as a guide, not a rulebook; exercise judgment to deliver quality work within project constraints.