Senior Service Designer

The Senior Service Designer is a foundational role. Rail has historically operated without a deep product design practice; we are building one, and you would be in the room as we make the early decisions that will shape the next several years of Wi-Tronix design. It’s also exactly the moment when AI is raising the bar that operators and dispatchers now expect software to anticipate, explain, and recover, not just display. You won’t inherit a mature design system or a polished pattern library. You will inherit the chance to shape one. For the right designer, that is everything.

CORE FUNCTIONS

• Lead deep, generative research with rail operators, dispatchers, mechanical teams, video specialists, and transit agency stakeholders using contextual inquiry, ride-alongs, control-room shadowing, diary studies, and structured stakeholder interviews to surface the operational truths that don’t show up in tickets or dashboards.
• Serve as Design Lead on the Passenger Solutions triad owning end-to-end usability and experience for transit operator, agency stakeholder, mechanical, dispatcher, and rider-facing workflows. Lead the ecosystem mapping and product-market-fit discovery work that establishes Wi-Tronix’s transit offering, partnering with the triad’s Product Lead and Tech Lead as a peer.
• Map the system before designing the screen. Build service blueprints, journey maps, ecosystem diagrams, and multi-actor flow models that connect front-stage user experiences to back-stage telemetry, integrations, and operational dependencies across Wi-Tronix and customer systems.
• Design for behavior, not just interface. Define state models, transition rules, fallback contracts, and trust calibration patterns for AI-mediated features (anomaly detection, automated incident routing, confidence-scored insights) so the system stays coherent when reality is messy.
• Translate dense telemetry into decision-ready visualizations. Lead UX for operational dashboards, situational-awareness views, and AI-assisted workflows that fuse video, audio, signals, and events into prioritized, role-specific guidance.
• Build the design and research infrastructure that future hires will join a research repository, a pattern library, behavior-contract templates, an operator panel. Your work in 2026 sets the foundation for 2–3 additional designers planned in 2027.
• Be a design partner to your team and the broader product organization. Help with smaller day-to-day UX needs across other triads as they arise (design feedback, pattern guidance, decision pressure-tests) and partner on the design function’s growth.
• Champion accessibility and inclusion (WCAG / ADA compliance) as foundational, not retroactive, especially for safety-critical workflows.

POSITION REQUIREMENTS

• 5+ years of combined experience as a Service Designer / Product Designer and as a User Researcher, with a portfolio that demonstrates both crafts at depth (not one as a side competency to the other).
• Demonstrated record of personally leading generative research in operational, multi-stakeholder, or mission-critical environments — scoping studies, recruiting, running field work, synthesizing patterns, and shipping insights that changed product direction.
• Strong portfolio of systems-thinking design. Service blueprints, ecosystem maps, journey models, behavior/state diagrams that drove real product decisions. We are hiring for the discipline some call “systems design”, the practice of designing across behavior, state, and constraints, not just screens.
• Strong track record designing for multi-actor, multi-channel operational platforms — examples from rail, logistics, public safety, healthcare ops, financial trading, energy, manufacturing, or comparable domains all welcome.
• Fluency in data visualization for high-density operational data (telemetry, time-series, geospatial, video / audio / event fusion, alerting hierarchies). You can defend a chart choice on perceptual and decision-task grounds, not just style it.
• Comfort designing AI-mediated experiences. Thinking explicitly about confidence, uncertainty, escalation, fallback, and recovery. Building UX patterns that earn user trust under real failure conditions.
• Expert proficiency with Figma. Working fluency with research and synthesis tools (Dovetail, Mural / FigJam, Lookback, or equivalent). Comfort using AI-assisted design and prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude Code, v0, etc.) to accelerate exploration and validate workflows.
• Excellent storytelling. You can sell a system-level design decision to a CTO, a frontline engineer, and a transit operations manager in the same week, and adjust the story for each.
• Comfort operating as the second senior designer at Wi-Tronix. Partnering on building the function, not waiting for established processes to exist before contributing.
• Bias for evidence over opinion. You ship to learn, then refine.

BONUS

• Background in service design, design research, applied human factors, or cognitive systems engineering.
• Prior work in regulated, safety-critical, or operations-control environments.
• Familiarity with rail, transit, fleet operations, IoT telemetry, or video analytics platforms.
• Mixed-methods comfort — pairing qualitative discovery with quantitative behavioral analysis or telemetry data.
• HCI graduate background (Northwestern Segal, IIT ID, U Illinois HCI, Carnegie Mellon HCI, equivalent).