UX Research & Design Lead

Black & Veatch Family of Companies • Cary, NC

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

The UX Research & Design Lead is accountable for discovering customer needs, shaping experience strategy, and orchestrating design delivery across Agile teams to maximize value, agility, predictability, and resilience for Digital products. This role ensures that every product decision is informed by validated insights, and every experience is designed to be usable, desirable, and inclusive. It bridges the gap between strategic intent and execution reality, translating business objectives into human-centered outcomes. This role is a critical part of the new Digital Products Operating Model (DPOM) to embed customer centricity and value at the heart of digital product delivery.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s/Master’s in HCI, Design, Psychology, Information Science, or related field.
• 10+ years in UX research/design with 3+ years leading teams or cross-functional initiatives.
• All applicants must be able to complete pre-employment onboarding requirements (if selected) which may include any/all of the following: criminal/civil background check, drug screen, and motor vehicle records search, in compliance with any applicable laws and regulations.

Nice To Haves

• Expert in human-centered design, Lean UX, and research methods (interviews, diary studies, surveys, usability testing, A/B tests).
• Experience delivering in Scrum or scaled Agile environments; SAFe certification (e.g., SAFe Agilist, SAFe POPM) preferred.
• Demonstrated impact via measurable improvements in product outcomes and operational efficiency.
• Ability to translate business strategy into actionable user stories.
• Proficiency with rapid prototyping and collaboration tools (e.g., Figma, FigJam/Miro) and backlog tools (e.g., Jira/ADO).
• Strong systems thinking: ability to connect customer needs to architecture, constraints, and product economics.
• Excellent storytelling and facilitation; able to align executives and squads around clear outcomes.
• AI Awareness: Basic understanding of prompt engineering, RAG, and AI-driven decision systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the discovery backlog: define research questions, methods (qual/quant), and learning objectives aligned to product strategy.
• Lead continuous customer interviews, usability tests, and behavioral analytics; synthesize insights into actionable recommendations.
• Maintain personas / Jobs To be Done, journey maps, and problem statements; validate assumptions early with prototypes and experiments.
• Create low to high fidelity prototypes to validate UI interaction, workflow and assumptions.
• Translate strategy into experience vision and north-star flows; decompose into incremental hypotheses and MVP slices for ART planning.
• Ensure accessibility and inclusivity (e.g., WCAG standards) and non-functional requirements are reflected in Definition of Ready/Done.
• Establish and evolve the design system (reusable design patterns, components, content guidelines) for consistency and speed at scale.
• Actively participate in PI Planning, iteration planning, backlog refinement, system demos, and Inspect & Adapt workshops.
• Partner with Product Managers/Product Owners to prioritize and accept UX stories; drive Built-In Quality and testability of experience outcomes.
• Orchestrate design delivery across pods/squads; align capacity and commitments with the Digital Team structure (UX roles within product engineering pods).
• Design and operationalize multi-source feedback loops (direct, proxy, stakeholder, telemetry); maintain a traceable feedback log to decisions.
• Run design reviews and outcome readouts; present insights and recommendations to leadership and cross-functional partners.
• Contribute to DPOM governance rituals (e.g., WBRs, retrospectives), linking experience metrics to funding and prioritization.
• Coach designers and researchers; upskill cross-functional teams in discovery and design methods.
• Champion an empowered, cross-functional product team model; foster collaboration across engineering, product, data, QA, and security.

Benefits

• We offer competitive compensation; 401K match and benefits that start day one.
• Our comprehensive benefits portfolio is a key component of this commitment and offers an array of health care benefits including but not limited to medical, dental and vision insurances along with disability and a robust wellness program.
• To support a healthy work-life balance, we offer flexible work schedules, paid vacation and holiday time, sick time, and dependent sick time.
• A variety of additional benefits are available to our professionals, including a company-matched 401k plan, adoption reimbursement, tuition reimbursement, vendor discounts, an employment referral program, AD&D insurance, pre-taxed accounts, voluntary legal plan and the B&V Credit Union.
• Professionals may also be eligible for a performance-based bonus program.
• As employee-owners, our professionals are empowered to drive not only their personal growth, but the company's long-term achievements - and they share in the financial rewards of the success through stock ownership.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level