Senior Interaction Designer for Rails Deployment

at Engine Yard

Location: San Francisco, CA

Engine Yard is looking for an interaction designer to help us build compelling Ruby on Rails deployment tools. We are on a mission to simplify Ruby on Rails deployments and developer environments. We're looking for someone who can interact with our customers, product management and engineering to help define our customer experience. We're seeking an interaction designer who can stick up for our users. Someone who can erase our assumptions about what the users wants and help discover what the user really needs.

Core responsibilities:
- Own the product usability
- Work closely with engineering and product management to blend business and technical possibilities with the the users' goals
- Coalescing user research and feature analysis into personas, workflow models, task grids
- Run ongoing usability tests to validate and test web-based experiences and how an API integrates into our customers workflow
- Produce appropriate specifications to communicate to engineering and product management
- Deliver feature specifications within an incremental product development process
- Establish processes of integrating usability into the product development process
- Treat an API with the same care as the web UI
- Pound on the table when we don't consider the user

Requirements:
- Experience running usability tests
- Familiar with Agile UX patterns
- Comfortable jumping in to "design on the fly" with product management or engineering where appropriate
- Know how and when to use various prototyping methods (from low-fidelity to high-fidelity)
- Knowing when to deliver prototypes as the final specification and when it's required to deliver wireframes or mockups
- Be able to break down large features into incremental user stories
- Be comfortable with working ahead of the development team at times or re-working a part of the system that is already built
- Be comfortable working around javascript (jQuery), front-end templating and css

The ideal candidate has:
- 2-3 years work experience as an engineer or have a degree in software engineering
- At least 4 years work experience as an interaction designer
- Built and deployed a Ruby on Rails application
- A successful product background
- Practiced interaction design on an Agile development team
- Followed or participated with the ongoing discussion on how UX/UID integrates with Agile development practices

Interested?

How to apply: Please send a resume with a cover letter to Joe Arnold, jarnold@engineyard.com