UX Research & Design Lead

Why Black and Veatch

Black & Veatch allows you to lend your talent and perspective to humanity’s biggest challenges in a flexible environment where you are empowered to grow and explore new possibilities. We offer competitive compensation; 401K match and benefits that start day one.  

 
At Black & Veatch, you own your career with purpose and meaning. You are empowered to grow and explore new possibilities at every step of your career journey. Bring your big ideas knowing you are safe to be who you are and speak up with concerns or questions and put your diverse talents and perspectives to use.

The Opportunity

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.

The Team

Black & Veatch’s Business Enablement consists of critical groups that help enable the organizations people, projects, and businesses to be as successful as possible.   Functions in this group include Digital & Information Technology, Global Finance, Global Human Resources, Legal, Risk Management, and Government Affairs and Real Estate and Building Services. 

Key Responsibilities

Research & Design

• 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.  

 Experience Strategy & Design Framework 

• 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.

 Agile Ways of Working (Delivery & Execution)

• 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).

 Feedback Loops & Governance

• 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.

Team Leadership & Enablement

• 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.

Management Responsibilities

Minimum Qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

• Adoption & Engagement: feature adoption, active use, time-to-first-value.
• Usability: task success rate, time-on-task, error rate.
• Customer Sentiment: NPS, CSAT, qualitative themes from interviews/feedback logs.
• Delivery Predictability: % UX commitments met per PI/iteration; cycle time from research insight to shipped improvement.
• Quality & Accessibility: production defect escape related to UX; accessibility conformance.
• Design Ops: reuse of design system assets; variance reduction across pods.

Work Environment/Physical Demands

Hybrid or flexible work options may be offered after the first 90 days of employment based upon manager discretion, job performance and work assignments.

Salary Plan

Job Grade