Product Design Manager

Anduril is a defense technology company, bringing Silicon Valley talent and funding to the defense sector. Our technology helps our customers tackle their toughest challenges by enabling them to make better, more informed decisions in life-and-death situations. We’ve assembled a diverse team of specialists in artificial intelligence, computer vision, sensor fusion, optics, and data analysis that are crafting software and hardware solutions to radically evolve the capabilities of the United States and our allies. If you are passionate about solving problems that have real impact, come join Anduril and build the future of defense.

ABOUT THE JOB

Anduril’s Product Design team is seeking an exceptional Design Manager to scale and grow our existing team of 6 designers. This is an opportunity to help craft the Lattice experience from the ground up, by building the Product Design team’s culture and the company’s interface design ethos and practice. Lattice is Anduril’s software ecosystem, which encompasses a flexible user interface that powers all operator workflows. The Product Design function sits within the Lattice Software Product group.

At its core, Product Design is responsible for shipping an effective end-to-end Lattice user experience. We partner with engineering and the business across all phases of product development—from ground truth problem definition and synthesis, to ideation and execution, to field testing and validation. With our focus on defense and autonomous systems, design plays a meaningful role in ensuring that front line decision makers have the best tools and information possible to swiftly understand a situation, evaluate courses of action, and act. In support of this mission, designers at Anduril own the end-to-end user experience of these tools.

As a Design Manager, you will use your excellent people management and team building skills to grow the team, implement structure and process as needed, and maintain a very high standard of design quality. In doing this, you will be expected to lead by example. This may take the form of identifying a key project investment and kicking off the project structure and success criteria, then pairing with another member of the team to hand it off and take that work forward. Or, you may take on smaller feature work to help alleviate pressure from an over scheduled team member. You will avoid becoming the bottleneck on day-to-day feature set ownership such that it impacts your ability to lead the team.

In doing this, you will bring your core design toolkit — interaction design, visual design, ideation, user research — and employ and adapt it in pursuit of end-user outcomes. Because we move fast across a variety of problem areas, you’ll likely find yourself using that toolkit to traverse both strategic product thinking and tactical design execution. You’ll iterate with your teammates in order to exchange and incorporate feedback. With the radical ownership and autonomy that you’ll find at Anduril, you’ll use your decomposition and synthesis abilities to holistically understand user, product, and business problems at hand. You’ll also make use of your precise communication skills to advocate for product solutions that benefit the user, and collaborate across roles in order to execute and ship.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Grow and scale the team. As a team leader and manager, you will have the responsibility to help each designer define and achieve their career goals, as well as continuously to increase the impact of design on the total Lattice ecosystem. You will put in place best practices to scale the function and create learning opportunities. You will partner with your group lead to define and own an excellent recruiting pipeline.
• Grow your craft, and that of the team. You will come to Anduril with industry leading skillsets in complex interaction design, visual design, user research, and prototyping strategies. When needed, you will help bring in external resources to help the team learn and grow in these areas.
• Build relationships and communicate with stakeholders. Through mockups, prototypes, and written documents you’ll share your designs and ideas with relevant partners, seek critical feedback, and push the product forward. You’ll work closely with engineers to ground your designs in technical feasibility. You’ll work with business leads and product managers to prioritize and tie the team’s work to user and business outcomes.
• Define design principle requirements and team prioritization. You will partner with leaders across the business to deeply understand the problems we are solving, what core design investments we need to make to hit those goals, and work with the team to determine prioritization and structure of the work.
• Drive design excellence. As the design manager, you will be responsible for ensuring design and live features meet a high bar of usability with appropriate visual finesse. You will help the organization navigate what this means for early prototype work vs long term production interfaces.
• Build a culture of collaboration. As Product Design at Anduril grows, you will help set team culture. You’ll enable best practices like design critiques in order to better your and others’ work, and you’ll help level up people in other roles to best collaborate with design. You will identify and implement processes that will help scale the function.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of software product design experience
• 5+ years of leading a product design team directly
• Design tooling proficiency. Proven ability to execute on interaction and visual design using industry-standard design tools. At Anduril, we generally use Figma for high fidelity mockups.
• Experience across the entire product development cycle.A track record of crafting and shipping high quality products that have been used by humans to achieve a goal.
• Familiarity with front-end software technologies. A deep enough understanding about front-end web technologies and languages (HTML/CSS/Javascript/React) to consider capabilities and limitations, collaborate with engineers, and ultimately produce realistic designs.
• Experience working in a fast-paced startup environment.
• U.S. Person status is required as this position needs to access export controlled data.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Front-end development proficiency. This is not a requirement, but we value the ability to engage in the code in order to hold the quality bar on what we ship, and to help the design team grow in this area as interest and time allows.

Anduril is an equal-opportunity employer, and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. If you are someone passionate to work on problems that matter, we’d love to hear from you!