Lead Product (UX) Designer
Mark43’s mission is to empower communities and their governments with modern technologies that improve the safety and quality of life for all. We build powerful, scalable, and elegant software that sets a new standard for the tools upon which our first responders rely. Our users are diverse, and we are therefore committed to embracing diversity of thought and experience within our team.
We are looking for a Lead Product Designer to take true ownership of a critical area of the Mark43 product portfolio. This is a senior individual contributor role for a designer who can set direction, bring clarity to complex and ambiguous problems, and lead cross-functional teams from discovery through delivery.
You will be the design leader for your product area, partnering closely with Product and Engineering to define not only how we solve problems, but which problems are most important to solve. You will deeply understand the needs of law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMS professionals, 911 dispatchers, and other first responders, translating those needs into thoughtful products that help people make critical decisions quickly and confidently.
While you will have clear ownership of a product area, your influence will extend across Mark43’s broader portfolio, including Computer Aided Dispatch, Records Management, Analytics and Insights, and mobile applications. You will also help shape how our Product Design team works, raising the bar for craft, discovery, systems thinking, and design leadership across the organization.
What You’ll Do
If you were part of our team, here are some things you might have done last week:
Set the design direction for a critical product area, identifying the most important customer and product problems to solve and creating a clear vision for how the experience should evolve over time.
Led a complex initiative from discovery through delivery, conducting research, synthesizing insights, exploring multiple approaches, and partnering with Product and Engineering to turn an ambiguous problem into a compelling product experience.
Made a difficult product tradeoff with your cross-functional partners, balancing user needs, technical constraints, business priorities, and long-term product strategy while advocating for the strongest possible customer experience.
Worked directly with first responders and public safety agencies, using qualitative and quantitative insights to understand high-stakes workflows and translate them into intuitive, reliable experiences that reduce cognitive load.
Designed across environments and devices, from multi-panel dispatch workstations to in-vehicle laptops, tablets, and mobile applications, thinking holistically about how information and interactions should work across an ecosystem.
Raised the quality of design beyond your immediate work, providing thoughtful critique, identifying opportunities for greater consistency, contributing to our design system and patterns, and helping other designers navigate challenging problems.
Presented a product vision or design recommendation to customers and senior leaders, clearly articulating the problem, your point of view, the tradeoffs considered, and the rationale behind your recommendation.
Explored how AI and emerging technologies can meaningfully improve public safety workflows, both by incorporating new tools into the design process and by shaping responsible, useful AI-powered experiences within our products.
Got into the details. You might have refined a tricky interaction in Figma, reviewed an implementation with Engineering, cleaned up edge cases, or worked through the less glamorous details required to turn a strong concept into an exceptional shipped product.
What You’ll Need
We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer with 10+ years of professional product design experience, including significant experience designing and shipping complex enterprise software. The scope of this role requires someone who has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to independently lead consequential product areas, navigate ambiguity, influence product strategy, and bring cross-functional teams toward a clear point of view.
You should bring:
10+ years of professional product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating significant ownership and impact on shipped software products
5+ years of experience designing complex enterprise SaaS products or similarly sophisticated systems and workflows
A track record of leading design for a substantial product area, including setting direction, prioritizing opportunities, and driving work from early discovery through shipped outcomes
Strong product judgment and the ability to move comfortably between customer needs, product strategy, interaction design, systems thinking, and detailed execution
Deep experience with qualitative and quantitative research and the ability to turn customer insights into clear product decisions
Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering leaders and influencing decisions without relying on formal authority
Excellent interaction and visual design skills, with a high bar for product craftsmanship
The ability to communicate complex design decisions clearly and persuasively to customers, peers, and senior leadership
Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment where the path forward is not always defined
Experience in public safety, law enforcement, fire, EMS, or other mission-critical software is a plus, as is experience designing for situational awareness, maps, responsive experiences, native iOS or Android applications, multimodal interactions, or AI/ML-powered products.
People who thrive on our team also tend to share the following characteristics:
They take ownership. You do not wait for a perfectly defined brief. You identify what needs to happen, bring the right people together, create clarity, and drive toward an outcome. You see yourself as accountable for the quality and impact of the product, not simply the design deliverable.
They are humble, open, and curious. You bring a strong point of view while remaining willing to change it. You seek out perspectives that challenge your assumptions and recognize that listening and learning are essential to designing products for people whose experiences may be very different from your own.
They lead through influence. You make the people and work around you better. You create alignment, give thoughtful feedback, share context freely, and help teams make stronger decisions rather than treating design as a function that operates in isolation.
They are comfortable with uncertainty. The problems we solve are complex, high stakes, and rarely have one obvious answer. You can create structure where there is ambiguity, make thoughtful decisions with incomplete information, and help others move forward with confidence.
They care deeply about craft and outcomes. You care about the details because they matter to our users, but you also know when to zoom out. You balance exceptional product quality with pragmatism and understand that great design ultimately needs to make a meaningful difference for the people using it.
Our Product & Design team builds technology used in some of the most consequential moments in our communities. Your work will directly influence the tools public safety professionals rely on to serve those communities, and you will have meaningful ownership over how those products evolve.
Mark43 is a remote-friendly environment, with offices in New York, Boston, and Manchester, UK. We value ideas over ego, embrace diversity of thought, and want our team members to have the ownership and support they need to do the best work of their careers.