Vice President of Design

Company Description

Air is the leader in Enterprise Readiness. Our mission is to establish readiness as a real-time condition that is continuously achieved. Today, a dangerous Readiness Gap exists between what the front line needs and what is delivered. Our AI-native platform, Air Enterprise Readiness, aligns development, production, delivery, and sustainment into one coordinated execution system for government agencies and industrial suppliers. By revealing true capacity, exposing real constraints, coordinating resources, and executing at the speed of operational demands, the front line gets what it needs to succeed.

Job Description

Air's customers run programs where one late part can hold up an entire fleet. Our platform pulls development, production, delivery, and sustainment into one execution system. The design challenge is making that system legible to the people who run it, and deciding with them where AI should act, where it should advise, and where it should stay out of the way.

As VP of Design, reporting to the CPTO, you'll lead product design, research, and design systems as a peer to Product, Engineering, and Data. You'll be in the room when we decide what to build and stay in it through delivery.

This role is a full-time position located out of our office in Arlington, VA / Pittsburgh, PA / San Francisco, CA / Anywhere in the US.

This role may require up to 25% travel.

Scope of Responsibilities

Set vision for the product experience

• Define an experience strategy for the Air platform that connects directly to how customers reach readiness, and to how Air wins and keeps accounts.
• Establish the principles that guide design decisions across teams, so hundreds of small calls add up to one coherent product.
• Identify the critical workflows across development, production, delivery, and sustainment, and make them measurable at the leadership level.

Design the system, not just the screens

• Map how work, data, and decisions actually move across a customer's enterprise and supply base. Use that map to shape product architecture and roadmap priorities.
• Work with Engineering and Data leadership on platform architecture so the product shows real constraints, opportunities, and solutions.
• Set the patterns for human–AI collaboration in agentic workflows. That means deciding what the system does on its own, what it recommends, what a person must approve, and how people know when to trust it.
• Build a design system and interaction language that scales across products, and that teams adopt because it makes them faster.

Co-create with the people who know the work

• Bring customers, domain experts, and internal teams into the design process early, through working sessions, live prototypes, and field visits, rather than presenting finished work for approval.
• Build a research practice that pairs field research in operational settings (depots, factories, program offices) with evaluative testing, and that informs product decisions as well as design decisions.
• Lead alignment across Product, Engineering, Data, and go-to-market when priorities compete. Turn competing mental models into a shared picture teams can build against.

Build the design organization

• Recruit and develop a team spanning product design, research, design systems, and AI interaction design. Grow leaders to support a scaling company.
• Lead the design function's shift into an AI-native development process: prototyping in code, working directly with models, and shortening the path from idea to something users can react to.
• Create career paths and a culture of craft, collaboration, and candor.

Qualifications

• U.S. Citizenship is required

Required Skills: 

• 10+ years in product design, including 5+ years leading design organizations, ideally as the senior design leader reporting to a C-level executive.
• A track record of design shaping product strategy and business outcomes in complex enterprise, analytics, or AI-native software.
• Systems thinking at the scale of a business, such as platform strategy, multi-product unification, service design, or workflows that span organizations.
• Experience leading co-creation with domain experts and executives in technical domains you didn't start out knowing, and turning that work into a shipped product.
• Hands-on fluency with AI, including designing for agentic or model-driven products and understanding how they fail.
• Deep grounding in research and HCI.
• Experience in high-growth environments where you built structure without slowing the team down.

Desired Skills: 

• Current possession of a U.S. security clearance, or the ability to obtain one with our sponsorship
• Experience designing for defense, government, or public sector
• Background in supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or industrial operations

We firmly believe that past performance is the best indicator of future performance.  If you thrive while building solutions to complex problems, are a self-starter, and are passionate about making an impact in global security, we’re eager to hear from you.   Air is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law.