UX Researcher

Salary Range: 115000 to 135000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

Position Overview

SteerBridge is seeking a UX Researcher to support a mission-critical Defense Aviation platform used by federal customers. This role focuses on understanding operational workflows in aviation readiness and sustainment environments and translating those insights into usable product experiences.

The researcher will work directly with designers, engineers, data scientists, and domain experts to ensure the system supports fleet readiness monitoring, maintenance planning, logistics coordination, and operational decision-making.

Unlike traditional or academically focused research roles, this position requires demonstrated experience applying UX research within a software product development environment. The researcher must be able to move beyond research findings and translate user insights into actionable product requirements, workflow improvements, interface concepts, and prototypes that can be implemented by design and engineering teams.

The ideal candidate has worked directly within multidisciplinary software teams and understands how UX research contributes throughout the product development lifecycle—from discovery and requirements definition through design, prototyping, usability validation, iteration, and implementation.

SteerBridge applies proven design patterns such as Medallion Architecture to structure, validate, and operationalize data within aviation analytics platforms. UX research ensures these architectural patterns translate into clear, usable, and decision-ready experiences for operators working in high-consequence environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Plan and conduct qualitative and quantitative UX research, including user interviews, contextual inquiries, surveys, workflow analysis, and observation of operational environments.

• Conduct usability testing on prototypes and production systems and synthesize findings into actionable insights that inform product and design decisions.

• Develop personas, journey maps, workflow models, and other research artifacts that capture user needs, behaviors, operational constraints, and decision-making patterns.

• Translate research findings into wireframes, prototypes, interaction models, and research-informed concepts that improve user workflows and experiences.

• Collaborate with product designers to refine concepts, support information architecture and interaction design decisions, and validate solutions through iterative usability testing.

• Partner with engineers, data teams, Product Owners, and subject matter experts to align user needs and operational workflows with system architecture and technical constraints.

• Participate in backlog refinement, design reviews, and design-to-development handoffs, providing clear research findings and documentation to support implementation.

• Conduct domain and competitive research on aviation logistics and sustainment systems, tools, and operational practices to inform product strategy and direction.

Required Qualifications

• Eligibility requirements: U.S. citizenship is required for this position under applicable federal contract requirements. Candidate must also be able to obtain and maintain the security clearance required for the role.

• 3+ years of professional UX research, human factors, or applied product research experience supporting software or digital product development.

• Strong command of UX research methodologies, including interviews, usability testing, workflow analysis, and research synthesis.

• Ability to analyze complex operational environments and translate research findings into clear user insights and actionable product requirements, workflows, interface concepts, prototypes, or product improvements.

• Experience working with complex enterprise or government software systems.

• Experience collaborating effectively with multidisciplinary teams, including engineers, designers, data scientists, Product Owners, and other stakeholders.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly present research findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with aviation, defense, logistics, or fleet management systems.

• Experience supporting enterprise analytics or decision-support platforms.

• Familiarity with data-driven interfaces, including dashboards and operational planning tools.

• Experience with Figma or similar prototyping and design tools.