Design at Swiftly
In the government software world, the focus has been pure function at the expense of usability. At Swiftly, we believe great products are both powerfully functional and well designed. We bring consumer software sensibilities to transit: experiences that flow, features that are easy to use, and work that is squarely aimed at real customer problems.
Our designers work closely with product and engineering from the start, often prototyping directly within the product rather than handing off from the side. What we design affects whether a rider trusts the information at their stop, whether a planner can justify a route change, whether an operator catches a problem before it compounds. We're a low-ego team that hires people with strong convictions held loosely — in service of finding the best solution rather than winning the argument.
About the Role
We're hiring two Senior Product Designers for two distinct problem spaces.
One role is focused on real-time passenger information. This team owns products for producing ETA predictions, disruption information such as detours, and service alerts that appear in rider-facing apps (e.g., Google Maps). The key design challenges on this team are making complex workflows easy to execute and converting nuanced technical information into clear insights. Agency staff often manage disruptions during emergencies, so drawing a detour or sending an alert has to take seconds. Looking ahead, the team is designing automated workflows in which the system detects the disruption, proposes a fix, and the dispatcher decides.
The other role focuses on our administration experience, in which an agency sets up its personnel and equipment. The design challenges are ones of scale, from giving each person access to exactly the data they should see, to configuring hundreds of onboard devices without visiting them one at a time. One of those devices announces the next stop out loud, which means designing how a street name gets pronounced and when a rider hears it. Little of this exists today, so you would set the pattern the rest of the platform follows.
What You'll Do
Across both roles, you will:
- Design software for transit agency staff across the full product cycle, from discovery and research through to prototypes and high-fidelity designs.
- Lead as an equal partner to your product and engineering counterparts. Help decide what the team builds, make the case for user-centered decisions with evidence, and hold the line on quality under pressure to ship.
- Plan and lead user research (interviews, usability tests, synthesis) and communicate findings in ways that change decisions.
- Design for the real-world context your work lands in, including the operational workflows and service outcomes that connect to the software.
- Stay embedded through the build, keeping the team honest about what users need as tradeoffs get made.
- Contribute to Swiftly's design system and help raise the team's design foundation over time.
What Will Set You Up for Success
We're looking for a portfolio that shows craft and problem-solving. Work you owned, showing how you moved from ambiguity to a clear outcome. Experience designing data-rich and operationally complex software will serve you well here. Swiftly's users are professionals with specific operational goals, and that shapes everything from how we frame problems to how we measure success. Be ready to speak to your process, your decisions, and the impact of your work.
You don't need to check every box. These describe the full range across both roles; we don't expect one person to bring it all. Two things we do expect from everyone are your ability to design well-crafted interfaces, and a track record of leading within an empowered product team.
You'll thrive here if you bring the following:
- 8+ years of experience and a track record of taking complex products from conception to completion.
- Proven leadership within an empowered product team. You have shaped roadmap and scope alongside product and engineering, argued for user-centered decisions with research and evidence, and changed your team's mind, and your own, when the evidence shifted.
- You use AI tools to prototype with production-level code, moving fast to test ideas at real fidelity. And you still sweat the details back on the canvas, getting every pixel right when it matters.
- Experience in complex domains: operational software, data-dense interfaces, or products where understanding the underlying logic is part of the design work. Comfort with automation and trigger-based systems is a strong signal.
- Comfort with data visualization and analytical UX: dashboards, reporting, and exploratory analysis. An interest in designing for open-ended, user-driven outputs (including AI-assisted or prompt-to-output paradigms) matters here, even without direct experience.
- An eye for how flows fit together across a product area, and how software decisions play out in the real world. Service design methods (blueprints, journey mapping) help; coherence across touchpoints and teams is the point.
- Strong user research skills: knowing which method to use, interviewing well, and turning findings into decisions rather than documents.
- You lift the designers around you through direct, specific feedback and mentorship, raising the standard of the work near you, not only your own.
Pay Range
In accordance with pay transparency laws, the approximate salary ranges for this position are listed below. These ranges represent the anticipated low and high end of the salary. Actual salaries will vary based on final role leveling, relevant experience, and geographic location. Salary is one component of Swiftly's total compensation package, which also includes stock options, competitive benefits, 401(k)/RRSP matching, and other perks.
- US: $120,000 - $160,000 USD
- Canada: $126,000 - $168,000 CAD
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