Senior UX designer

We are looking for an expert in current design thinking with an appetite for  technology and innovation: you will be working on desktop applications as well as web applications for enterprise cloud services and an operating system for IoT and embedded devices, bringing exciting new projects to life and improving existing ones.

Senior designers should be strong communicators who are as much at ease talking to and working with senior executives as they are their own teammates. They can represent their team or the Design department at cross functional company meetings and will be able to voice/present the Design position with clarity and precision.

You will be working closely with other user experience and visual designers, front and back end developers, and project management, as part of the design team, reporting to the Design Director.

What you will be doing

• You will be leading your product-specific projects, driving design and delivery against agreed goals and working with designers, product management and engineering to deliver on the strategic vision for Canonical.
• You will manage incoming requests for work that affects you and needs to be considered (e.g project briefs) and balance and prioritise the various projects’ requirements. In your day to day you are defining the scope, milestones and deliverables for any given iteration.
• You apply agile/lean project management methodologies. You will be the person resolving any blockers on your projects, through clear communication with project management and actively seeking help from team members, your manager and others.
• You will liaise with relevant stakeholders and engineers to achieve company goals, making time to talk via messaging applications, setting up and attending regular meetings, reviewing work with them in advance, sharing progress and seeking their input to achieve consensus and drive progress.
• We try as much as we can to share our experiences and knowledge within the team and to the community through informal presentations, the design blog and external events.

Upcoming projects include

• Ongoing work to add functionality and maintain quality of several web applications.
• Review, recommendations and incremental improvements of Ubuntu Single Sign on.
• Driving the adoption of Vanilla, our front end framework. You will use or iterate existing patterns or when desired to design new patterns that are used across Canonical products and available as an open source resource.

Skills we are looking for.

• Ability to maintain a good view across a number of projects, and to be a go-to person for the design team as a whole and work with other seniors and leads to align overall departmental processes
• Ability to develop the process / approach for tackling a design problem and to lead the exploration and design solutions of undefined problem spaces
• Ability to set up, attend and run weekly catch-ups with engineers and stakeholders you are collaborating with
• Ability to articulate clearly and effectively your design decisions to team members, engineers and stakeholders
• Motivation to drive understanding of impact and success metrics to focus your efforts. Develop a good working knowledge of KPI’s and Google Analytics - goal setting and tracking, A/B testing etc.
• Proficiency in design and prototyping tools and basic understanding of HTML and CSS

What we offer

• Opportunity to help shape a company and a product with strong influence in the open source community
• A fantastic work environment within a team of friendly people with a broad range of skill sets, from UX and visual designers to engineers
• Opportunity to create work that will be seen by millions of people
• A great location, right next to Tate Modern in Southbank, within walking distance to London Bridge, Waterloo, Borough Market and Southbank Centre
• Benefits package, including cycle to work scheme, pension scheme and health insurance