Senior Manager, User Experience

At Appfire, we believe that great work happens when people get to choose how they work. After 20 years of creating software that empowers teams to break silos and collaborate seamlessly, we've learned that one size does not fit all. We’re a team of 800+ employees, working remotely across 28 countries. Our flagship products include: JXL, Comala Document Management, 7Pace Time Tracker, Jira Misc Workflow Extensions, and BigPicture. 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. Facilitation . Including where the stakes are highest. Much of the evidence we need comes out of sessions you design and run: discovery workshops, co-design and alignment sessions, prioritisation exercises with Product and Engineering, participatory work with customers. You'll set the standard for how those are run here, and you'll personally run the ones that matter most (think enterprise accounts, executive sponsors, advisory boards) where the session has to produce something valuable and strengthen the relationship in the process. 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 Strong workshop design and facilitation. You've run discovery workshops, co-design sessions, and prioritisation exercises with mixed rooms of designers, PMs, engineers and customers, and you can run a successful session even when agendas conflict and someone senior arrives with the solution already decided Experience working directly with high-profile or strategic customers and turning those sessions into research the team can act on resulting in stronger customer relationships 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 Fluency with participatory and generative methods (design games, card sorts, journey and service mapping) 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 12 Wellness Days — one fully paid day off each month to recharge, available on an ad-hoc basis and 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 & Lifestyle Private health insurance through UNIQA, fully covered by Appfire Bulgaria Multisport Card with access to hundreds of gyms, studios, and swimming pools across Bulgaria, fully paid by Appfie Food vouchers via a prepaid Pluxee lunch card with a monthly allowance Transportation - Employees in Sofia receive a fully paid Sofia City Transport Card, providing access to all forms of public transportation within the city. Family Support - Employees receive a one-time net Baby Bonus upon the birth of a child. Flexibility - This role is fully remote within Bulgaria Market recognition Appfire has been consistently recognized for company growth, culture, corporate social responsibility, and product excellence and has been included among the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Inc. Best Workplaces, BuiltIn Best Places to Work, and Inc. 5000. Equal Employer Opportunity (EEO) Appfire is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as defined by applicable law. Our commitment extends to all employment practices, including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, compensation, benefits, and termination.