Product Designer

Job Title: Product Designer

Reports To: Senior Product Designer 

FLSA: Exempt

About us:

120Water is a mission-driven SaaS company helping government agencies and utilities protect public health and give communities confidence in their water. Our platform unifies water data in one place, enabling customers to easily manage compliance and streamline everything from sampling to community communication and public transparency.

We power critical initiatives like lead service line inventories, water quality and asset compliance, giving those responsible for water safety the tools they need to operate with clarity, precision, and speed.

At 120Water, we believe water is one of the world’s most important resources, and the work we do directly impacts communities across the country. We’re building a team of people who care deeply about solving complex problems, collaborating across disciplines, and using technology to drive meaningful impact.

A winning candidate will demonstrate 120Water core values:

• People First

We have empathy for operators, appreciation for regulators, and a priority to serve public health. We treat all with respect, and communicate with clarity, candor and kindness.

• Mission Guided

We are committed to delivering pragmatic software solutions that enable us to have an impact at scale. We move with purpose and priority in order to accelerate the mission.

• Outcome Driven

We bring a team-first approach to deliver on our commitments to our customers. We strengthen our trusted-advisor status by doing what we say we’ll do.

The role

You will be part of  the Product team, owning the design of specific modules end to end: research, flows, interaction detail, visual polish and handoff. You will partner with a product manager and an engineering pod on each module, and in addition will be expected to be both the steward of UX practices as well as our internal UI language. 

This is a mid-level role that will report to the Senior Product Designer. You have shipped real software to real users at least twice and can run a design track without someone checking each screen. You still want a senior partner to push your thinking, and you will get one in the product leadership team and in regular design critique.

What you'll do

• Own the design of one or two modules at a time, from the first problem framing through to the shipped screen and the follow-up fixes.

• Talk to users. Sit in on customer calls, run short interviews, watch Pendo session replays, and turn what you see into concrete design changes. Dead clicks and rage clicks are a brief, not a mystery.

• Build flows and prototypes using a combination of Figma and AI tools that engineers can build from without guessing. Cover the empty states, the error states and the loading states, not only the happy path.

• Write the words on the screen. Labels, empty states, confirmation dialogs and error messages are part of the design, and you own the first draft.

• Review engineering work before release and flag where the build drifted from the design, with a clear call on what blocks the release and what can ship as a follow-up.

• Present your work in critique and in product reviews. Explain the tradeoffs you made and take feedback without defending the pixels.

What you bring

• 3 to 5 years designing B2B or enterprise software that shipped, with at least one or two major features you can walk us through from research to release and tell us what you got wrong.

• Fluency in Figma: components, variants, auto layout and prototypes. Willingness to expand fluency to the MCP server and how it can grow into a component library.

• Experience working inside an established design system and extending it with care. You know when to reuse, when to adapt and when to raise your hand.

• Hands-on research habits. You have run user interviews or usability sessions yourself and changed a design because of what you heard.

• Comfort with dense, data-heavy interfaces: tables, filters, maps, forms with 40 fields and workflows that span days. Our users live in these screens.

• Clear writing. You can draft microcopy, a design rationale and a handoff note that an engineer in another time zone can act on.

• A working relationship with engineers. You understand enough about how front-end code gets built to design things that can be built well, and you ask when you do not.

• Judgment about scope. You can tell the difference between the change a user needs this quarter and the redesign they would enjoy next year, and you ship the first one.

Nice to have

• You have designed for regulated industries, utilities, GIS or field operations, or for users who work outdoors on a phone with gloves on.

• You have used Pendo or a similar analytics and session replay tool to find problems before users reported them.

• You have helped roll a new design language across an existing product, including the awkward middle period where old and new screens sit side by side.

• You have designed mapping or spatial interfaces.

What great looks like

1. You start from the user's job, not the feature request. When a customer asks for a button, you find out what they were trying to finish and design for that.

2. You ship. A good design in production this month beats a better design in Figma next quarter, and you make that call without being told.

3. You use evidence. Session replays, support tickets, interview notes and usage data show up in your design reviews as reasons, not decoration.

4. Engineers trust your handoffs. They build from your files without a meeting, and when they hit a gap you answer the same day.

5. You push back with care. When a PM or an executive asks for something that hurts the user, you say so, show the alternative and let the team decide.

6. You are organized. Your files, your  tasks and your open questions are current, and nobody has to ask where things stand.