Staff Product Designer

About the role

Selara is hiring a Staff Product Designer to work on VA.gov, the digital front door for the Department of Veterans Affairs. The services you design reach millions of Veterans who use VA.gov to apply for benefits, manage their health care, and track their claims. Good design here is not decoration. It is the difference between a Veteran finishing an application and giving up on it.

This is a staff level role. You will ship product design on a cross-functional team and raise the design bar well beyond your own work.

What you'll do

• Own product design for VA.gov experiences end to end, from discovery and research through shipped, measured outcomes
• Plan and run research with Veterans and VA staff, then turn findings into decisions the whole team can act on
• Design within the VA Design System and contribute improvements back to it, so every experience stays consistent with the rest of VA.gov
• Design form-heavy, high-stakes flows in plain language that people can complete under stress
• Treat accessibility as a first-class design constraint and deliver work that meets WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 from the first draft, not as a cleanup pass
• Work shoulder to shoulder with engineers, iterating in staging and reviewing built work against design intent
• Set design standards, mentor designers and teammates in user-centered practice, and represent design in program-level reviews

What we're looking for

• Significant product design experience, typically eight or more years across research, interaction design, visual design, and content design
• A portfolio of shipped, complex services, ideally forms, eligibility flows, or other transactional experiences rather than marketing surfaces
• Hands-on research skill, including usability testing, synthesis, and the judgment to pick lightweight methods that fit the moment
• Deep working knowledge of accessible design practice and experience shipping to WCAG and Section 508 standards
• Fluency working inside a mature design system and the judgment to know when to extend it
• Strong facilitation, writing, and mentoring skills in a remote, distributed team
• The ability to influence product direction through partnership rather than authority

Nice to have

• Experience designing for VA.gov, another federal agency, or regulated industries like health care
• Familiarity with the US Web Design System or the VA Design System
• Experience with government design review cycles such as design intent and staging reviews
• Comfort reading and lightly prototyping in HTML and CSS

Location and eligibility

This role is fully remote within the United States. Work on VA.gov requires the ability to obtain and maintain a federal Public Trust suitability determination, which includes a background investigation.

About Selara

Selara is a Veteran-led digital services company. We build modern, accessible software for the public sector, and we hold our own work to the same standard we set for the services Veterans rely on.