Principal UX Designer

You're the kind of person who can't wait to put something in front of users they can react to. Long hours invested in user research and analysis have given you a deep understanding of what these folks truly care about and what they need. Faster feedback means you're that much closer to the real breakthrough design—the one that lights people up and gives them that "a-ha" moment.

Over the years you've developed lots of ways to ideate, prototype, and iterate quickly and effectively. You've worked with product management to identify outcomes and metrics that help the team evaluate the success—or failure, d'oh!—of each iteration. You've dived into the deep end with subject matter experts and surfaced with simplified workflows, concepts, and visualizations that make sense to regular users. You've let others into your process and built goodwill by being transparent, communicative, accountable, and generous. You're always learning from others and mentoring in turn, helping the entire team become more user-centered and empathetic.

At Expel, we've embraced experimentation and iteration as a core design and business philosophy and practice. Our product organization is split into fast-paced feature teams that own scoping, implementation, metrics, and outcomes.

UX isn't an afterthought, it's a differentiator and foundational competency with champions in leadership. There's no BS and no politics, just a team of exceptionally smart, responsible professionals who want to win by making the best experience for our customers.

We believe Expel is a uniquely empowering place to practice our craft, and we'd love you to join us and make great cybersecurity user experiences (for a change)!

What Expel can do for you

• Provide a ton of support and autonomy to do your best work, in a psychologically safe environment that truly promotes diversity, collaboration, initiative, and candor.
• Give you a chance to have revenue impact with a brand new threat hunting product—it's a blank slate, and we need your help figuring out what to build.
• Back up your design vision with a team of fast, capable developers eager to experiment with you and a whip-smart product manager with an innovative vision for threat hunting.
• Support your professional development with a conference budget as well as training, writing, presenting, and mentoring opportunities.
• Keep you engaged and motivated with regular UX team meetings and social events.
• Build your domain expertise in the exciting, hyper-growth cybersecurity industry.

What you can do for Expel

• Design prototypes for a new cloud hunting offering that allow us to validate product-market fit and solve the right problems for customers.
• Conduct user research with both customers and prospects and develop insights that define product direction.
• Use Lean UX experiments to rapidly test and iterate on the design.
• Help define metrics and outcomes that bring objectivity and accountability to the team's efforts.
• Craft research-based personas that the team actually uses to prioritize and reject ideas.
• Use and contribute to our design system.
• Help the UX team build out playbooks for research, experimentation, and other common design scenarios.
• Teach others how to fish: help non-designers improve their user research and analysis skills.

What you should bring with you

• Several years experience designing products with complex business logic, technical constraints, edge cases, and similar challenges that require collaboration with engineering.
• Deep experience in user research, analysis, insights, and actionable personas.
• Ability to quickly navigate and make sense of undefined problem spaces, and to bring others along with you using models, diagrams, sketching, workshops, collaborative design sessions, and other tools and artifacts.
• Curiosity and willingness to dive into the technical details with engineers, when needed.
• Ability to articulate and document the design problem, the tradeoffs inherent in each solution, and the impact of different approaches.
• High level of comfort with ambiguity, changes in direction, and moving on from failures—this is a startup, after all.
• Interest in and familiarity with business frameworks like product-led growth, crossing the chasm, jobs to be done, service design, and service quality.
• Portfolio examples that include dashboards and reports.
• Experience in infosec is helpful but not required. We'll get you up to speed, don't worry!
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years of experience in UX, product design, and/or service design.

Additional notes

At Expel, our employee benefits reflect our commitment to our crew. Unlimited PTO, equity for everyone, work location flexibility, up to 24 weeks of parental leave, and excellent health benefits are some of the ways we care for our Expletives.

• We're only hiring those authorized to work in the United States. We do not currently sponsor immigration visas.
• Our office is based in Herndon, Virginia. However, we will consider 100% remote work for this position.

We're an Equal Opportunity Employer: You'll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

We'll ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please let us know if you need accommodation of any kind.