Senior UI/UX Designer (MTSD)

Mission Driven Research (MDR) is here to deliver technical excellence with a mission-driven mindset - going the extra mile for our customers, growing our people personally and professionally, and giving generously to our communities. We're looking for a skilled, AI-native senior UI/UX designer who will join our Multimode Threat Simulation Development (MTSD) team in Huntsville, Alabama and become part of our rapidly growing defense technology company operating in missile defense, UAS/counter-UAS, and intelligence markets. You will be part of an elite software development team poised to outbuild teams several times our size through principled adoption of emerging toolsets, and backed by a culture of deep respect for our employees and shared mission.

Here's what you'll be doing: You'll design, build, and ship intuitive, high-performance user interfaces as an integral part of a team solving two fiendishly hard, still unsolved problems:

• Build a variable-fidelity, engineering-level defense simulation for multimode countermeasure development: flexible enough to answer many kinds of questions, but highly performant at the specific tasks it's pointed at. People have been trying to build this for >40 years, and the graveyard is full of sim frameworks that ended up flexible, fast, or fit for purpose, but never all three. We think we can actually do it.
• Go AI-native without creating a bigger mess to clean up. Agentic coding and design tools accelerate the pace of development. But wielded indiscriminately, they end up accruing a mountain of tech debt. What's rare is a process where agentic tools turn into a sustained increase in development velocity with high quality. This requires human oversight and human skill at every point that matters, documentation that stays true, a codebase that people actually understand, and guardrails that keep one bad agent run from torpedoing weeks of work. If you've used these tools seriously, you know exactly which headaches we mean. We intend to avoid them, not suffer them.

As part of this process, you will build the human face of the simulation framework: the interfaces, visualizations, and workflows that engineers and analysts use to drive it. You'll work within an AI-native workflow that moves at agent speed, guided by your skill and understanding. You'll spend quality time with our customers and end users - engineers, analysts, and operators - because deeply understanding many stakeholders' needs is where great design starts. You'll be responsible for user experience design worthy of engineering-level modeling, natural language interfaces that make AI a first-class part of the product, and blending AI-accelerated design with the judgment that delivers interfaces people love to use. This position is considered a senior position. You will need to be able to demonstrate an exceptional degree of technical ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, aptitude for building (as opposed to simply analyzing or theorizing), and clear communication. You will be a self-starter and able to demonstrate a history of seeking out, identifying, and capitalizing on learning opportunities. In short, we're looking for someone with the talent and grit overmatch to build at agent speed without sacrificing even a pinch of beauty, simplicity, or intuitiveness.

Here's what you'll need: You must have a bachelor's degree at minimum, in a design, human-computer interaction, scientific, or engineering field. Also, we're looking for someone with 7+ years of full-time professional experience in a UI/UX design, engineering, or software development role. Finally, you must possess or have the ability to obtain an active Secret Security Clearance. Lacking any one of these disqualifies you from this job. You also must have:

• Outstanding demonstrated competence and ingenuity in UI/UX design - visual design, interaction design, information architecture, and usability - with the craft to make complex, data-dense tools feel simple and beautiful [Must be able to quickly understand, apply, and adapt challenging technical concepts in your domain without a walkthrough]
• Working fluency in modern front-end code (e.g. TypeScript, React): enough to read it, prototype in it, and speak the language of the developers who ship it [This is a design role, not a coding role, but fluency is what lets you design things that can actually be built]
• Facility with the tools of the design trade: design and prototyping tools (e.g. Figma), AI-native design and UI-generation tools (e.g. Figma Make, v0, Lovable), geospatial and 3D visualization concepts (e.g. Cesium, WebGL/Three.js), and enough familiarity with the developer toolchain (Git, browser dev tools) to collaborate and hand off cleanly [AI can generate screens all day long, but you're the one who has to make them beautiful, coherent, and loved by the people who use them]
• Demonstrated ability to design and implement natural language interfaces, including conversational interactions, agentic workflows, and experiences where AI is a critical part of the UI/UX itself, not just the process that built it [Show us an interface where AI made the product better, not just the demo flashier]
• Exceptional aptitude for building tangible products [Must be able to demonstrate this by a portfolio of shipped interfaces, design systems, or serious side projects]
• Strong intellectual curiosity [You will be asked to leave your comfort zone early and often, so we're looking for evidence that you've done this on your own before]
• Preference for self-directed work [You'll work with our top technical talent, but we're looking for evidence that when given a problem to solve, you know how to identify and execute the means for solving it.]
• Demonstrated history of effective collaboration [You'll be working with multiple other people as part of a variety of integrated teams and must be capable of both shouldering work yourself and leading projects with little guidance. This implies other things like good communication, planning and coordination, and 'soft' skills.]
• Demonstrated ability to engage customers directly to deeply understand their needs [You'll interact with many stakeholders, from engineers to analysts, operators to program managers, and the best design decisions come from understanding what each of them actually needs, not just what they say they want]

Other qualifications we hope you bring to the table:

• Experience building interfaces for simulations, numerical software, or other data-dense engineering tools [If you've made a complex dataset effortless to explore or turned an engineer-only tool into something anyone can drive, we want to hear about it!]
• Experience working in a startup environment
• Familiarity with DoD modeling & simulation verification, validation, and accreditation (VV&A) processes
• A background in physics, electrical engineering, or modeling & simulation [Our sim models real-world phenomena, and domain intuition makes you a better builder of it]

Other specifics about this position:

Contingent upon contract award? Yes, this position is contingent upon contract award.