Consultant, User Experience: Cognitive Systems

If you’re passionate about becoming a Nationwide associate and believe you have the potential to be something great, let’s talk. At Nationwide®, “on your side” goes beyond just words. Our customers are at the center of everything we do and we’re looking for associates who are passionate about delivering extraordinary care.

About the role

Nationwide is building a durable, enterprise practice for how people and AI work together responsibly. As AI moves from assisting to acting — from answering questions to taking multi-step action across our tools, endpoints, and business processes — we need someone who can design the human-AI systems that keep judgment, oversight, and accountability firmly in human hands.

The Cognitive Systems Engineer sets the standards for Human-AI Teaming (HAT) and the governance controls that make AI adoption safe, effective, and scalable. This is an experienced individual-contributor consultative role. Alongside setting standards, you will remain hands-on — doing project work directly, applying HAT and governance methods on live initiatives so the standards stay grounded in real practice. You will define how we design, test, and evaluate human-AI systems; mentor practitioners and people leaders; and partner across UX, Technology, AI Risk, and platform teams. You will be positioned to co-own — and over time own — a core enterprise capability, reducing the organization's dependence on any single expert and making responsible AI a repeatable discipline rather than a heroic effort.

What you'll do

Set the standard for Human-AI Teaming

• Establish shared quality criteria for HAT work — evaluating systems against the qualities of being aligned, understandable, controllable, and resilient.
• Design coordination patterns that make explicit how authority, proactivity, input, and output are divided between humans and AI, and how the level of AI authority and initiative changes the way the team must communicate and stay coordinated.
• Frame problems around the decision to be made and the human oversight required, rather than the tool or model.

Embed governance and controls

• Translate enterprise AI governance expectations into practical, usable controls, guardrails, and review practices that teams can apply in planning, development, and production.
• Define control objectives for meaningful human judgment, safe handoffs, failure modes and fallback paths, attribution, and kill-switch / intervention decision rights for increasingly autonomous agents.
• Extend a platform-agnostic control set across agentic platforms and endpoints, clarifying what platform owners, risk partners, and product teams each own.
• Partner with AI Risk, Information Risk Governance, model risk management, and security on threat testing and pre-release readiness for AI agents — including agents built by citizen developers.

Build capability in others (reduce single-threaded dependency)

• Mentor and coach UX practitioners, engineers, and people leaders, moving them from awareness into advanced, routine HAT execution: problem scoping, prompt shaping with decision context, coordination-pattern design, and review against HAT principles.
• Create reusable frameworks, job aids, and enablement so responsible AI practices are embedded in everyday work rather than dependent on individual experts.

Do the work on live projects

• Apply HAT and governance methods directly on active projects — scoping problems, shaping decision-context prompts, designing and reviewing coordination patterns, and evaluating systems against the four qualities.
• Partner hands-on with practitioners and citizen developers on real AI and AI-agent work, including heuristic evaluation and threat-testing readiness, rather than advising only from the sidelines.
• Use project work as a proving ground for the standards, surfacing gaps and improving the frameworks based on what real delivery demands.

Advise and influence

• Serve as a trusted advisor to leadership on where HAT should be in scope, what strong outputs look like, and how to improve funding and readiness conversations.
• Translate complex human-AI and governance concepts into clear, practical guidance for both leaders and practitioners.
• Represent human-AI teaming in cross-functional forums such as AI review and red-team discussions, endpoint-agent pilots, and platform control design.

What you bring

Highly Preferred

• 5+ years of relevant experience in cognitive systems engineering, human factors, human-systems integration, UX research/design, human-AI interaction, or a closely related discipline — with demonstrated senior/lead impact.
• Expertise in designing human-machine or human-AI systems where human oversight, decision-making, and accountability are central.
• Strong grounding in how modern AI systems (LLMs, AI agents) actually work, their behaviors, and their failure modes — enough to reason about risk and oversight rather than only use the tools.
• Proven ability to create standards, frameworks, and rubrics that others adopt, and to raise the quality of work across a team or organization.
• Experience translating governance, risk, or compliance requirements into practical controls and workflows.
• Excellent facilitation, coaching, and written communication skills, including the ability to make complex concepts clear to non-technical leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor others and build shared ownership rather than becoming the single point of dependency.

Preferred

• Background in cognitive systems engineering, cognitive science, human factors, decision science, or applied experimental psychology.
• Experience with AI governance, model risk management, threat/red-team testing, or responsible-AI programs.
• Familiarity with decision modeling and structured approaches to reasoning under uncertainty.
• Experience in a regulated industry such as financial services or insurance.
• Experience designing enablement, training, or upskilling programs at scale.

How you'll be measured

• The quality, adoption, and durability of HAT and governance standards across the organization.
• Growth in practitioner and leader capability, and reduced dependence on any single expert.
• Evidence that human-AI systems are being designed and reviewed for meaningful human oversight, with risks identified earlier and rework reduced.
• Strength of cross-functional partnerships across UX, Technology, AI Risk, and platform teams.

Job Description Summary

Do you shine in at least one core user experience (UX) competency? We have a passion for creating exceptional experiences that have a real impact on people’s live and futures. If you understand the value UX provides in achieving strategic objectives and can articulate that value to cross-functional teams and business partners, we want to know more about you!

As a Consultant in the User Experience organization, in addition to expertise in one core strength (experience strategy, research, information architecture, interaction design, interface design, front-end development, content strategy or design operations), you’ll need to demonstrate a thorough grasp of a couple others. It'll be important to have a deep understanding of the design process and ability to work in the ambiguous discovery phase of identifying the right problem to tackle and the details of delivering desirable products. You’ll also have opportunities to help teams to distill complex problems into clear solutions that exemplify standard methodologies and encourage others. You are a visionary and will need to be adept at articulating and defending design decisions in a way that can be understood.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities:

• Consults and collaborates with stakeholders, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company to provide strategic, creative and technical direction.

• Advocates for empathetic, human-centered design. Helps mitigate risk by pursuing work based on insights and an understanding of our users.

• Problem solves, thinks big, influences and explores divergent ideas while understanding how to converge and build iteratively towards the best solution.

• Designs and recommends innovative multi-platform solutions that balance customer needs with business viability and technical feasibility.

• Participates in and facilitates idea-generating sessions evaluating those ideas with regards to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.

• Able to think strategically and connect your work to a larger picture. Helps everyone consider the end-to-end experience and connect the dots.

• Mentors and guides the team in their craft and profession to continually uplift the quality of our work.

• Perceive rapid advancements in technology and how customers expect to interact with our company.

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Reporting Relationships: Reports to Manager/Director. May have opportunity to manage a team based on organizational structure.

Typical Skills and Experiences:

  

Education: Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.

Experience: Typically, five or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.

Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Comfortable speaking publicly to large groups and explaining design rationale to other parts of the business. Solid, working understanding of UX principles and the human-centered design process. Able to leverage data to make informed design decisions. Ability to navigate multiple partner groups and tell compelling narratives. Owns work with little oversight. Independently and proactively seeks out answers as needed. Can provide oversight for a single project or multiple projects. Acts as a source of expertise for direction, mentoring and guidance for less experienced team members. Works with development team to resolve technically complex issues requiring alignment across multiple business partners and subject areas.

Skills/Competencies: Ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative information and external factors that may influence or have an impact on the company as well as the customers, distribution systems, operations, and strategy. Proven ability to set work priorities that conform with established objectives, timeframes and accomplish a task in the most effective manner. Ability to work in partnership with cross-functional teams (e.g., engineers, product managers, designers, business leaders, etc.). Understand and make progress toward the company’s consumer performance indicator (CPI) and key performance indicator (KPI) goals. Proven ability to manage projects and define administrative methods and procedures to attain objectives.

Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.

Staffing exceptions to the above must be approved by the hiring manager’s leader and HR Business Partner.

Values: Regularly and consistently demonstrates Nationwide Values.

Job Conditions: 

Overtime Eligibility: Not Eligible (Exempt)

Working Conditions: Normal Office Environment. Extended work hours may be necessary during heavier volume work periods. Travel required as necessary.

ADA:  The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job.  Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.

We currently anticipate accepting applications until 08/31/2026. However, we encourage early submissions, as the posting may close sooner if a strong candidate slate is identified before the deadline.

Benefits

We have an array of benefits to fit your needs, including: medical/dental/vision, life insurance, short and long term disability coverage, paid time off with newly hired associates receiving a minimum of 18 days paid time off each full calendar year pro-rated quarterly based on hire date, nine paid holidays, 8 hours of Lifetime paid time off, 8 hours of Unity Day paid time off, 401(k) with company match, company-paid pension plan, business casual attire, and more. To learn more about the benefits we offer, click here.

Nationwide is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone feels challenged, appreciated, respected and engaged. Nationwide prohibits discrimination and harassment and affords equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants without regard to any characteristic (or classification) protected by applicable law.

This position could be filled within any of the lower 48 U.S. states.

Smoke-Free Iowa Statement: Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, its affiliates and subsidiaries comply with the Iowa Smokefree Air Act. Smoking is prohibited in all enclosed areas on or around company premises as well as company issued vehicles. The company offers designated smoking areas in which smoking is permitted at each individual location. The Act prohibits retaliation for reporting complaints or violations. For more information on the Iowa Smokefree Air Act, individuals may contact the Smokefree Air Act Helpline at 888-944-2247.

For NY residents please review the following state law information: Notice of Employee Rights, Protections, and Obligations LS740 (ny.gov) https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2022/02/ls740_1.pdf

NOTE TO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES:

We value the partnerships we have built with our preferred vendors. Nationwide does not accept unsolicited resumes from employment agencies. All resumes submitted by employment agencies directly to any Nationwide employee or hiring manager in any form without a signed Nationwide Client Services Agreement on file and search engagement for that position will be deemed unsolicited in nature. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is subsequently hired as a result of the referral or through other means.

Nationwide pays on a geographic-specific salary structure and placement within the actual starting salary range for this position will be determined by a number of factors including the skills, education, training, credentials and experience of the candidate; the scope, complexity and location of the role as well as the cost of labor in the market; and other conditions of employment. If a Sales job, Sales Incentives, based on performance goals are possible in addition to this range. Note on Compensation for Part-Time Roles: Please be aware that the salary ranges listed below reflect full-time compensation. Actual compensation may be prorated based on the number of hours worked relative to a full-time schedule.

The national salary range for Consultant, User Experience : $108,000.00-$200,000.00

The expected starting salary range for Consultant, User Experience : $108,000.00 - $162,000.00