Director of Design Engineering

ROLE SUMMARY

Babel Street is building mission-ready intelligence applications that help analysts move from signal to insight faster, with higher trust. As the Director of Design Engineering, you will own the end-to-end product experience key workflows—designing intuitive interfaces and shipping production-grade front-end code that integrates AI directly into the user journey.

This is a “builder” role: you will pair human-centered design with strong front-end engineering to deliver experiences that feel simple, fast, and trustworthy—even when the underlying systems (data fusion, entity resolution, AI agents, multimodal analytics) are complex. You’ll collaborate tightly with Product, Platform, and AI teams to operationalize AI in the UI with guardrails, transparency, and human-machine teaming.

This is a hybrid role working out of either our Reston, VA or our Somerville, MA office

WHAT YOU’LL DO (KEY RESPONSIBILITIES)

Own the AI-first user experience for intelligence workflows

• Design and implement workflows where AI meaningfully reduces cognitive load (e.g., investigation setup, triage, summarization, entity linking, report generation, alert review).

• Build “AI-in-the-flow” patterns: inline suggestions, copilots, agent task panels, explainable recommendations, smart defaults, and guided wizards—without turning the product into a chat box.

• Define interaction patterns for agentic experiences (tasking, progress, tool calls, approvals, undo/redo, auditability, and fail-safe fallbacks).

Human-Centered Design (HCD) with real users and real constraints

• Conduct lightweight user research (interviews, usability tests, workflow observation) and translate insights into journey maps, task flows, wireframes, prototypes, and shipped UI.

• Partner with Product to clarify user problems, success criteria, and tradeoffs—then execute quickly and iteratively.

• Ensure the UX supports novice-to-expert progression (discoverability for new users, speed and power features for experts).

Build and ship high-quality front-end software

• Implement designs in a modern front-end stack (typically React + TypeScript), delivering clean, testable, accessible, performant UI.

• Build reusable components and patterns; contribute to (or lead) a design system using tools like Figma + Storybook.

• Instrument experiences with analytics/telemetry to measure adoption, workflow success, and time-to-insight improvements.

Trust, safety, and transparency in AI experiences

• Design for “evidence-first” outputs: citations, sources, confidence indicators, what-changed diffs, and clear user controls.

• Implement guardrails in the UI: policy-aware interactions, redaction/PII-aware patterns (where applicable), and safe failure modes.

• Close the loop with feedback: capture user ratings, corrections, and outcomes to improve models and workflows over time.

Cross-functional execution and leadership

• Work daily with Product, AI/ML, and Backend teams to define API contracts, data needs, latency targets, and UX acceptance criteria.

• Raise the bar on craft: advocate for coherent UX, consistent patterns, and high-quality delivery—while keeping momentum and pragmatism.

• Mentor others informally through design critiques, code reviews, and clear communication.

WHAT YOU BRING (REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS)

• 10+ years of experience delivering UX/UI design + front-end engineering for modern web applications (or equivalent depth).

• Strong portfolio demonstrating shipped product work (not just concepts)—including complex workflows and/or data-rich applications.

• Proficiency building production UIs with React and TypeScript (or comparable modern framework experience).

• Fluency in HCD methods: user interviews, task analysis, prototyping, usability testing, and iterative delivery.

• Strong product instincts: can translate ambiguity into clear workflows, make smart tradeoffs, and ship in increments.

• Experience integrating with APIs and data services; comfort collaborating on interface contracts and edge cases.

• Working knowledge of accessibility (WCAG fundamentals), performance basics, and secure UI patterns (auth, RBAC-aware UX).

Benefits at Babel Street (just to name a few...)

• Health Benefits: Babel Street covers 85-100% monthly premium costs for Medical, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability insurances – for you and your family!
• Retirement Plans: Babel Street offers both a Traditional and Roth 401(K) with a very competitive match.
• Unlimited Flexible Leave: We trust our employees to manage their own time and balance their personal and work lives.
• Holidays: Babel Street provides employees with 12 paid Federal Holidays
• Tuition Reimbursement: We are committed to investing in our employees. One way we do that is with our Tuition Reimbursement Program for continuing education.

Babel Street is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. Further, Babel Street will not discriminate against applicants for inquiring about, discussing or disclosing their pay or, in certain circumstances, the pay of their co‐worker, Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination. In addition, Babel Street's policy is to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works. Upon request, we will provide you with more information about such accommodations.