About Skylight
Skylight is at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how the government serves the public in a digital world.
We’re looking for skilled individuals to join our talented team of technologists in driving this movement forward.
You’ll be a key part of our small, but rapidly growing team, which consists of former Presidential Innovation Fellows, founders of 18F, and members of the U.S. Digital Service.
We work in small, fast, agile teams to create exceptional customer experiences and enduring solutions out of the government’s most complex design and technology challenges. The work is challenging, but highly rewarding.
About the job
At Skylight, product designers play a critical role in understanding the problem space, identifying opportunities, and developing solutions using a lean-agile approach. Product designers are the primary user advocate on their team and engage in continuous research throughout the product life cycle. Working end-to-end from concept to implementation, product designers conduct research, facilitate design activities, and ensure the product team is building the right thing.
What you’ll do
- Work alongside product managers, engineers, and other practitioners responsible for making critical decisions about product strategy
- Plan and conduct research to inform strategic product and design direction
- Define end-to-end flows that incorporate well-thought-out information architecture, systems thinking, design principles, and common design patterns
- Create simple and elegant user interfaces and/or evolve existing visual systems with clear rationale
- Apply a design process that incorporates frequent iterations and feedback
- Create mockups and design artifacts as needed to help the team develop a shared understanding of the product vision
- Balance user and business needs within an agile working environment
- Uphold human-centered design principles and evangelize its value to stakeholders, engagement partners, and subject matter experts
- Promote empathy for the general public and government workers as we seek to improve their tools and technology
What we're looking for
Minimum qualifications
- Able to plan, synthesize, and share out generative and evaluative user research to inform product and design direction
- Can define scalable, end-to-end interaction flows that incorporate key design principles, intentional information architectures, common design patterns, and accessibility
- Can create simple, elegant, and thoughtful user interfaces through the implementation of visual design elements, such as branding, illustration, iconography, typography, or microinteractions
- Understand how to use different design processes (e.g., double diamond) and can produce documentation for storytelling that helps your team and stakeholders empathize with users
- Can contribute to product strategy decisions by aligning design processes with lean/agile methodologies, serving as the primary voice for users, prioritizing and balancing user and business decisions, and crafting mental models to help define and refine product opportunities
- Can facilitate and communicate well, including communicating your design rationale to different groups (users, teammates, stakeholders) effectively
- Ability to demonstrate product design leadership through actions such as driving excellence in your team’s design execution
- Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
- Passionate about creating better public outcomes through great government services
- A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
- Ability to travel for work from time to time
Nice-to-have qualifications
- Prior experience working in the civic tech space
- Experience working in a remote-team environment
Don’t meet 100% of the criteria but think you can do the job? We’d love to chat anyway! We’re on a mission to build diverse teams, and studies have shown that women and marginalized folks are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t check every box.
Other requirements
- All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
- You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
- As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance.
- Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.
Position type
This is a full-time, exempt position.
Location
This is a fully remote position.
Care package
Salary
We want to give you the most competitive salary possible. After all, you deserve it! To that end, we use the results of our interview process to determine what salary is most appropriate given your current level of seniority. For a Product Designer at Skylight, the current salary ranges are as follows:
- Associate Product Designer: $90,000–$125,000
- Product Designer I: $120,000–$140,000
- Product Designer II: $135,000–$160,000
- Senior Product Designer: $150,000–$185,000
- Staff Product Designer: $170,000–$203,000
- Principal Product Designer: $180,000–$230,000
Benefits
Your well-being is important to us, so we focus on supporting you in a variety of ways:
- Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance
- Short-term and long-term disability insurance
- Life and AD&D insurance
- Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account
- Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period
- Paid time off, including 20 vacation days, 11 federal holidays, and flexible sick leave
- Up to 12 weeks paid time off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents
- Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options
- Business development / sales bonuses
- Referral bonuses
- Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development
- Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases
- Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more)
- Dollar-for-dollar charity donation matching, up to $500 per year
- Access up to $1,000 before payday to cover emergency expenses
- Flexible, remote-friendly work environment
- An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good
Interview tips
- Visit our join page to learn more about how our interview process works.
- Check out our Career Pathways framework to learn more about the different roles within Skylight and the skills needed to do them.
- Please include a portfolio of 1–2 showcase projects with your application. Your portfolio can be anything from a website to a slide deck (whatever works for you). So that we can prioritize your application for consideration, please ensure that you either remove your access password to your portfolio or provide access details.
- If you’d like to request reasonable accommodations during the application or interviewing process, please contact our recruiting team at recruiting@skylight.digital.
We participate in E-Verify and upon hire, will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you’re authorized to work in the U.S.
We're an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, pregnancy, disability, work-related injury, covered veteran status, political ideology, marital status, or any other factor that the law protects from employment discrimination.
