Senior Manager, User Experience

About the role

Plenty of companies call themselves user-centered. Far fewer can tell you what their customers were struggling with badly enough to change tools, and show you the evidence.

Appfire has a large product portfolio, much of it built through acquisition, used by teams who live inside their tools all day. That makes our central UX problem less about improving individual screens and more about two harder things: making a portfolio of products feel like it was designed by one company, and figuring out what a product interface even is now that AI agents are doing work inside it.

We're shipping AI agent capabilities across the portfolio right now. The interaction patterns for that (how you tell a user what an agent did, how much confidence to convey, when to ask permission, how to undo something an agent got wrong…) are not settled anywhere in the industry, let alone here. Someone needs to own them.

You'll lead designers, report directly to our VP of Product Management, and own both the quality of what ships and the systems that let a growing discipline scale without losing craft.

One thing to be upfront about: we're looking for someone who has done both research and design. That isn't a wish-list item. Our own competency framework expects designers to plan and run research end to end from their first level onward, so a leader with depth on only one side can't credibly coach or assess half of the work.

What you'll own

The craft bar. What ships, and whether it's good. You'll run design critique and research review, set the standard for prototyping and interaction quality, and hold the line without becoming the bottleneck everything queues behind. Accessibility sits here too, WCAG conformance and assistive-technology testing built into the flow of work, not bolted on as a pre-release audit.

Jobs to be Done, in practice. It means coaching the team to run documentary-style timeline interviews rather than sliding back into usability tests, and it means getting job stories into the backlog in a form engineering will actually use.

AI-driven UX. We are evolving how we work in the PDLC and SDLC. UX has a critical role to play. We need UX leadership to define the interaction patterns, principles, and guardrails our teams design against when they build AI capability: setting expectations, communicating uncertainty, designing for error and recovery, keeping a human meaningfully in the loop, and making automated behaviour explainable and reversible. You'll build this into a pattern library other teams can actually use, and an evaluation approach so we can tell whether a pattern works rather than arguing about it. You'll also bring AI into how the discipline itself operates (research synthesis, early exploration, design ops) while keeping human judgement in charge of what we conclude and ship.

The relationship with Engineering and Product. Handoff standards, technical documentation, and discussing job stories so engineering can estimate and build. Where feasibility, business goals, and user needs conflict, you make the trade-off explicit instead of absorbing it quietly.

Research that changes decisions. Beyond JTBD, you'll drive to mature our research muscle. YOu will define research standards, methods, and tooling for the discipline, and hold the line on rigour: sampling, bias, and honest limits on what a given method can tell us.

The discipline's operating system. Design Operations and Research Operations: tooling, templates, participant recruitment, and the processes that let this scale. You'll also set the strategic direction for our design system with Engineering, so consistency is the easy path rather than the disciplined one.

The team. Hiring, onboarding, performance, and growth. You'll steward our UX career framework across both tracks, the individual-contributor path through to Principal and the people-leadership path, and you'll be expected to extend it, since it currently has gaps we know about and want fixed.

What success looks like

• A clear UX strategy and operating rhythm in place, with a documented and honest read on where our practice actually stands
• Clear evidence that our work is informed by customer research
• Best in class design practices
• AI UX principles and an initial pattern set that teams are designing against, with evidence they hold up in testing.
• A UX team that leverages AI in their day to day work in a manner that increases customer value delivery and quality of that delivery.
• UX metrics defined, tracked, and reported credibly at the leadership level, measuring customer progress rather than feature usage
• A career framework that reflects how the discipline actually works now, including AI and research competencies
• Measurably stronger output: better craft, faster evidence, less rework, and UX influencing product direction earlier than it does today

What you'll need

• Minimum of 5 years of substantial experience in UX with genuine depth in both user research and product design, not one with passing familiarity of the other
• At least 5 years managing designers and/or researchers directly, with specific examples of people you've grown
• Hands-on Jobs to be Done experience: you've personally run switch interviews, you can explain how a JTBD interview differs from a usability test, and you've turned the output into job stories that changed what a team built. You know the difference between a functional, emotional, and social job, and you can tell when JTBD is the wrong lens
• Hands-on experience designing or leading design for AI or ML-powered features, and a clear point of view on what makes those experiences trustworthy
• Deep command of research methodology more broadly: unbiased interviewing, surveys, concept and usability testing, ethnographic work, and mixed-method study design
• Strong design craft: information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, and the ability to explain a solution to an engineer and to an executive in the terms each of them cares about
• Experience defining outcome-based UX metrics and using them to move a roadmap
• Real fluency in how design and engineering hand off to each other inside an Agile environment
• Comfort with ambiguity. The problems here are numerous, loosely defined, span multiple teams, and often need investigating before they can even be stated correctly
• B2B or enterprise SaaS experience, ideally developer- or IT-adjacent products

Nice to have

• Experience in the Atlassian ecosystem or a comparable platform ecosystem
• Experience scaling a design system or research repository from scratch
• Experience building or rewriting a UX career framework and levelling criteria
• Background contributing to an accessibility conformance program

Benefits & Perks

Equity

Every Appfire team member is eligible for company equity, fostering a true sense of ownership and connection to our growth.

Time Off & Wellbeing

• 26 paid vacation days annually, regardless of tenure
• Wellness Days - one fully paid day off each month for an unplanned emergency, rest, or recovery needs available on an ad-hoc basis (not carried over month-to-month)
• 24 hours of paid volunteer time to support meaningful causes outside of work
• 3 fully paid volunteering days each year through Appfire Town, our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program supporting local communities

Learning & Development

Grow with Appfire University — our custom, on-demand learning platform designed to support continuous learning and professional development.

Health & Insurance

• Fully covered Luxmed private healthcare plan
• Option to extend coverage to your partner or add personalized upgrades
• UNUM life insurance, fully paid by Appfire

Lifestyle & Benefits

• MyBenefit Platform with 150 PLN per month to spend on:
• a Multisport card
• shopping
• restaurants
• entertainment experiences
• Lunch Card with 300 PLN monthly for groceries or dining out via a virtual prepaid Pluxee card (Google Pay or Apple Wallet supported)

Remote Work Support

Receive 200 PLN net per month as a home office allowance to help cover electricity and internet costs while working remotely.