User Experience Design Senior Manager

Job Description

Why This Role Matters

We are seeking a Senior Manager, User Experience Design to lead Expeditors' newly centralized UX organization, the founding people-leadership role for UX. Previously, designers were hired team by team and worked largely independent from one another. By bringing them together, we are now operating as one UX team: a shared craft bar and standards, designers who review, mentor, and grow alongside each other, and the right designer matched to the right problem, so Expeditors ships more consistent, higher-quality experiences.

As the manager of the UX practice, you own three things: your people, your capacity, and your craft. You will manage six to eight designers, keep them embedded as partners to their product teams, and raise the quality, consistency, and accessibility bar across every product.

Team and Technology

You will lead a team of six to eight designers operating as embedded members of cross-functional teams with shared accountability for outcomes, not a design-as-service queue. The team partners closely with Technical Product Managers, Engineering, business stakeholders, and the GUIDE UX Center of Enablement team.

The UX practice uses modern design and delivery tooling, including Figma, Azure DevOps/Boards, GUIDE design systems, Storybook, Microsoft 365, and AI-enabled capabilities. This role will help define the practices, guardrails, and tooling for applying AI across the design lifecycle, including research synthesis, ideation, content and UX writing, prototyping, and design-to-development handoff.

What Success Looks Like

• A single, trusted view of UX capacity and demand is live and used in planning.
• Designers are allocated to the highest-value work with balanced load and minimal over-allocation.
• Coverage gaps are visible and shrinking, with unmet demand quantified to support headcount decisions.
• Design quality, consistency, and accessibility improve measurably across products as GUIDE adoption rises.
• A clear, adopted approach for designing with AI is in place, and the team is fluent in modern tooling.
• The team grows in line with qualified business needs while ensuring strong onboarding and retention.

Key Areas of Impact

Team Leadership and Development

• Lead, coach, and grow the UX design team, including hiring and day-to-day management. Own performance and career development against the established UX career ladder, running regular 1:1s, feedback, and growth plans.
• Build onboarding pathways so new designers ramp quickly into both the UX practice and their assigned product teams. Define leadership and management expectations for the UX practice and cultivate a culture of craft, collaboration, and continuous learning.

Technology Delivery and Execution

• Own UX intake, ensuring it is triaged, t-shirt sized, and prioritized with Technical Product Managers. Maintain a transparent demand backlog, make trade-offs visible, and schedule tactical work against spare capacity.
• Ensure design is embedded in discovery and delivery, co-owning problem framing and success criteria with Product and Engineering.

Operational Excellence

• Establish the operating rituals and tooling that make the practice run, and the throughput and partner-satisfaction measures that show it is working.
• Run quarterly capacity planning and weekly resourcing triage. Keep the capacity ledger current in Azure DevOps, splitting a designer's capacity across teams without double-counting, and give leadership a single, real-time view through the UX Power BI dashboard and Delivery Plan.

Technical and Strategic Direction

• Set and continuously raise the bar for design quality, consistency, and accessibility across all products. Run design critiques and reviews; establish shared standards, patterns, and a clear definition of done for design work; and champion adoption of the GUIDE design system.
• Define how Expeditors designs with AI: the practices, guardrails, and tooling for applying AI across the design lifecycle, including clear standards for where AI adds value and where human judgment, craft, and accessibility must lead. Evaluate and adopt AI-enabled capabilities that accelerate design and design-to-development handoff, and keep the team fluent in modern design tooling.

Stakeholder Partnership

• Uphold clear decision rights: Product cofounders, Technical Product Managers and Engineers, own product priorities within an allocation, while you own which UX designers are allocated where and the craft quality bar.
• Partner with Technical Product Managers, Engineering, and business stakeholders so UX work is scoped and sequenced against each team's roadmap. Represent UX in planning and portfolio forums, and escalate contested priorities and allocation conflicts with the Director and product leaders.

Resource and Vendor Alignment

• Own the UX capacity model: allocate designers to product teams based on demand, priority, and continuity. Balance load across the team to prevent over-allocation and burnout, and use capacity and demand data to inform headcount, prioritization, and investment decisions.
• Partner with leadership to support budget planning, forecasting, and resource allocation activities for the UX practice. Manage vendor, agency, and service-provider relationships where applicable.

This position is on-site and will reside in the greater Seattle, WA. area at one of the following locations depending on availability. Candidates must be local or willing to relocate. Relocation assistance is not offered for this position.

• Downtown Seattle
• Federal Way
• Lynnwood
• Bellevue (Factoria)

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business, a related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience leading or managing a team of designers, or a senior/lead designer ready to step into people management, including coaching, feedback, and performance development, with a track record of building high-performing technical teams.
• Deep UX craft background spanning user research, interaction design and information architecture, visual/UI design, accessibility, and design systems.
• Demonstrated ability to manage capacity, allocation, or resourcing across multiple teams or projects with operational rigor gained leading technology teams, programs, products, platforms, or services.
• Experience applying AI to design work, and the judgment to define how a team designs with AI responsibly, balancing speed with craft, quality, and accessibility.
• Fluency with modern design and delivery tooling: Figma, Azure DevOps / Boards, design systems (e.g., GUIDE / Storybook), and Microsoft 365.
• Experience leading complex initiatives involving multiple stakeholders and dependencies, partnering with business and technology leaders to achieve organizational objectives.

Preferred

• Logistics, supply chain, or complex enterprise/mission-critical domain experience.

Applicants are required to be eligible to lawfully work in the U.S. immediately; employer will not transfer or sponsor applicants for U.S. work authorization (such as an H-1B visa) for this opportunity. 

Additional Information

Base Salary: $100,000

Additional Compensation: This position is eligible for quarterly bonuses based on company performance. Bonus payments are discretionary and are not guaranteed. Historically, some employees in this position have achieved average total annual compensation of $236,000 or more when bonuses are included.

Benefits: Expeditors offers competitive benefits to all full-time employees including:

• Paid vacation
• Holidays (10)
• Flexible Days (2)
• Paid Sick Time (accrual rate of 1 hour of sick time per 30 hours paid)
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan with employer match
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Medical, Prescription Drug, Dental & Vision Coverage
• Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Life and Disability Insurance
• Paid Parental Leave (additional eligibility criteria)
• Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account (DC FSA)
• Commuter Benefit
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Training and Personnel Development Program
• Educational Assistance and Reimbursement
• Position is full time (40 hours per week) Monday through Friday 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.