Product Designer

Product Designer

Hiring Manager: Andrew Hoff

About the Company

The U.S. is investing over $100B annually in software-defined and autonomous technologies but lacks the infrastructure to evaluate how they perform under pressure, which are most effective, and how to employ them. This creates an ecosystem-wide bottleneck: 18-24 month test cycles stall acquisition and adoption when the tempo of warfare and technology development are both measured in days. Today's workaround isn't structurally sustainable:

American companies send their engineers to the front lines of active wars because that's the only place they can get continuous, realistic feedback.

Valkryn is America's premier test partner for the AI era. Backed by a16z American Dynamism and founded by veterans of Anduril, SpaceX, Palantir, and Applied Intuition, we build and deploy the commercial "Battle Lab" technology stack: fully automated, sensorized and on-demand test environments with realistic threats, orchestrated by an intelligent software layer, and repeatable across a global network of physical sites. The Battle Lab is how the U.S. will test like it needs to fight, at the speed it already builds.

Come test with us.

About the Job

You'll be Valkryn's first designer and own the design of our test platform. Our users plan test campaigns, run live events on a range, and dig through the resulting data. Today they do it through screens built by engineers. Your job is to make the product easy to learn, fast to use, and beautiful to work in.

There's a bigger job underneath. We think the way testing is done today isn't good enough for what our customers need, and a better interface on the same process won't fix it. You'll rethink the process itself.

This is not a web design role. The platform conveys hard things: live geospatial pictures of a range, dense telemetry, test results that drive real acquisition decisions. You'll define the design language for all of it, from how a track renders on a map to how an analyst reads a report. That takes understanding the customer's work well enough to have your own opinions about it.

What You’ll Do

• Own product design for the platform end to end: research, workflows, interaction design, and visual design
• Define the design language for complex data: geospatial representation, data visualization, live operational views, and analysis
• Turn complex, expert-driven workflows (test planning, range operations, analysis) into software that's easy to learn and fast to use
• Talk to customers and get on the range: build your own understanding of how testing actually works, and bring opinions back
• Partner with frontend engineering to turn the design language into a component system that ships
• Set the visual bar for everything the company puts in front of a customer

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years designing software products, with a portfolio that shows shipped work on complex or data-dense applications
• Product sense: you form your own view of the customer's problem and can defend a workflow decision, not just a layout
• Demonstrated strength in both interaction design and visual craft; this role has no separate UX and UI designers to lean on
• Experience designing visualizations of complex data
• Comfort working directly with engineers and shipping without a design organization around you
• Comfort with ambiguity and the pace of an early-stage company
• U.S. citizen with the ability to obtain a U.S. security clearance
• Willingness to work in our NYC office, 5 days per week

Preferred

• Experience designing geospatial or map-based products
• Experience designing game UI: heads-up displays, maps, and live game state are close relatives of our problems
• Experience with operational or mission-critical software (defense, aerospace, industrial, medical)
• Experience building or governing a design system
• Fluency with AI tools as a multiplier on your output
• Experience as an early designer at a startup
• Existing Secret or Top Secret level U.S. security clearance