UI/UX Designer/Engineer

Altamira Technologies has a long and successful history providing innovative solutions throughout the U.S. National Security community. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Altamira serves the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities by focusing on creating innovative solutions leveraging common standards in architecture, data and security. Altamira believes that our people and the culture of our company differentiate us from other companies. Altamira is seeking a UI/UX Designer/Engineer to support our National Space Intelligence Center (NSIC) customer.

Job Description

Altamira is expanding and refining our UX processes for Altamira developed, user focused applications to improve our customer’s user experience.

This position offers fast paced real-world experience specifically in software development for military and government customers.  The core goal of our work is to design intuitive and effective user interfaces and workflows by properly executing UX methodologies.  Our customer’s requirements are deeply technical and complex, requiring candidates with software development experience, customer interaction experience, and UX experience.

Our challenges include limited access to users and their current tools. The motivations of our customer are often different than what is found in commercial domains.

• Applicants with examples of work have an advantage over those that do not
• We use Windows and Linux environments for development, a working knowledge of Windows and Linux is a plus
• Introduction of new tools and techniques is welcomed

Responsibilities and Duties

• Gather, interpret, and validate understanding of user and customer requirements
• Break down, frame, and analyze the problems to be solved
• Work in collaboration with cross-functional developers to clarify and ensure team understanding of each problem and solution
• Design user interfaces and interactivity solutions
• Effectively communicate design specifications to graphic designers and developers through sketches, low fidelity/notional wireframes, etc.
• Document work, findings, artifacts, etc.
• Work closely with development leads to synchronize and integrate UX and design cycles into their feature development iterations
• Monitor and communicate new industry UX and design practices

Qualifications and Skills

• Knowledge of UX processes and mindset to gather requirements, analyze a problem, solve that problem abstractly, and translate into a user interface design
• Ability to build an abstract model (mind maps, cognitive models, flow diagrams, etc.)
• Ability to create rough and notional user interface designs (sketches, low fidelity mockups, wireframes, etc.) that can be communicated to graphic designers and developers for implementation
• Strong and effective communication skills
• Assertive mindset to advocate for user needs while understanding practical compromises that need to be made to keep project development moving forward

Experience

We understand that a good UX professional may come from a broad range of disciplines. It's important that you can convey your experience in UX and how you got to where you are.

Education

Preferably a 4-year degree in any of the following fields or related disciplines:

• User Experience Design
• User Interface Design
• Interaction Design
• Software Development
• Human Factors
• Cognitive Systems
• Engineering Psychology
• Human Computer Interaction