Lead UX Designer

insightsoftware is looking for a Lead UX Designer to join the newly established UX team within the Certent Equity Management (CEM) product organization. Reporting to the UX Manager, Equity, this role is responsible for owning complex workflow design, contributing to the CEM design system, and driving design quality across the platform through close partnership with Product Management and Engineering. 

The Lead UX Designer brings deep expertise in interaction design and enterprise SaaS workflow complexity. This is a hands-on design leadership role responsible for translating research findings and product requirements into interaction models, validated prototypes, and production-ready design specifications, while also helping to establish the tools, standards, and practices that will govern design delivery as the team scales. 

This role is about more than executing individual feature designs. It's an opportunity to shape how the organization thinks about UX delivery: contributing to discovery, helping evolve the design system, and making sure every design decision is grounded in user evidence, aligned to business goals, and achievable within engineering constraints. 

Key Responsibilities 

Discovery & Research Partnership 

• Lead heuristic evaluations of the current CEM platform, documenting usability, accessibility, workflow, and consistency issues across core functional domains, and synthesizing findings into actionable design priorities 

• Translate qualitative and quantitative research findings into workflow models, interaction patterns, and validated design directions 

• Contribute to stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry sessions, and customer collaboration activities bringing a designer’s perspective to discovery work and ensuring research translates directly into design output 

Design System Partnership 

• Help establish, govern, and evolve the CEM design system including branded component variants, interaction patterns, accessibility standards consistently across all design output 

• Collaborate with the UX Manager and Engineering to contribute new components, patterns, and documentation to the design system as new workflows surface design needs not yet covered by existing standards 

• Maintain design file hygiene and Figma library alignment ensuring design work is structured to support clean handoff to Engineering and reduce implementation ambiguity 

• Participate in design system reviews providing interaction design input on component behavior, states, and accessibility as the system evolves 

Interaction Design & Prototyping 

• Own end-to-end UX design for high-complexity CEM workflows from initial concept through validated prototype to production-ready specification. 

• Produce interaction models, annotated wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes, and design specifications sufficient for engineering implementation without loss of design intent 

• Lead iterative design reviews with Product, Engineering, and senior stakeholders communicating design rationale clearly and incorporating feedback without compromising user experience quality 

• Participate in sprint reviews and QA walkthroughs for high-impact features, evaluating whether delivered experiences align with design intent and flagging gaps for resolution 

Lean UX & Dual-Track Delivery 

• Operate within a Lean UX model paired closely with engineering through dual-track collaboration: running design discovery ahead of delivery sprints to provide just-in-time designs that are validated before engineering commitment 

• Define and maintain a clear MVP design scope in partnership with Product Management establishing success metrics that enable a ship-and-measure approach for well-understood, lower-risk features 

• Contribute to post-delivery UX evaluation using application analytics to assess adoption, identify friction points, and inform the next design iteration 

• Balance design thoroughness with delivery velocity: knowing when to invest in deeper exploration and when to move quickly with a well-reasoned, testable design hypothesis 

AI-Assisted Design & Development Enablement 

• Leverage AI prototyping tools to accelerate design exploration, concept validation, and the generation of design artifacts across the product development lifecycle 

• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to evaluate AI-generated UI and production-ready code against design system standards and accessibility requirements, ensuring output meets the CEM quality bar before release 

Design Operations & Practice Building 

• Partner with the UX Manager to establish design delivery processes, file organization standards, handoff conventions, and quality gates that support consistent, high-quality output as the team scales 

• Contribute to the CEM design repository maintaining organized Figma libraries, component documentation, and reusable pattern documentation that reduces redundant design work across the team 

Required Qualifications 

Experience 

• 8+ years of UX design experience, with progressive responsibility leading complex workflow design across enterprise SaaS applications 

• Demonstrated experience owning or making major contributions to a design system in a production SaaS environment. 

• Proven ability to produce high-fidelity interaction designs and prototypes for dense, data-intensive enterprise applications with a portfolio demonstrating mastery of information hierarchy, workflow efficiency, and accessibility in dense, data-intensive enterprise UI contexts 

• Experience in a Lean UX or dual-track agile delivery model, validating with users iteratively, and delivering just-in-time specifications  

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with Product Management and Engineering, including contributing to discovery, shaping requirements, and communicating design rationale to non-design audiences 

Technical & Design Tool Proficiency 

• Expert-level Figma proficiency including component architecture, auto layout, variables, and library governance for multi-designer environments 

• Working familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) and the practical application of accessible design patterns in enterprise UI contexts 

• Comfort with developer handoff tools and practices sufficient to collaborate directly with front-end engineers and reduce implementation ambiguity 

• Working familiarity with a component library; sufficient to design within component constraints and collaborate meaningfully with front-end engineers on implementation tradeoffs 

Education 

• Bachelor’s degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Graphic Design, Information Science, or a related field required; equivalent professional experience considered 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience designing for financial services, enterprise resource planning (ERP), or similarly complex B2B SaaS platforms where user workflows involve high-stakes data and regulatory context 

• Experience building a design system from scratch or near-scratch in a greenfield product initiative, including defining contribution models and governance frameworks 

• Experience using AI-assisted tools to support prototyping, user research synthesis, and design exploration, including familiarity with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., Cursor, Lovable) or modern IDEs 

• Experience contributing to or leading UX discovery for platform modernization or migration programs, where design work directly informed next-generation product architecture 

• Familiarity with product analytics or behavioral instrumentation tools used for post-release UX evaluation and iteration 

• Experience in a high-growth, fast-paced SaaS company where design quality and delivery velocity must be balanced simultaneously