Principal Designer

Your Impact

The design decisions you make will determine whether millions of Americans can access college. You’ll shape the future of studentaid.gov — the system that processes $120 billion in federal aid each year.

The Design Challenge

You’ll own design strategy and user experience for systems that handle:

• Over 10M applications in a 6-month window with brutal traffic spikes and unforgiving deadlines
• Complex workflows serving students, parents, and financial aid administrators
• Policy requirements that change constantly but must be implemented perfectly
• Accessibility standards that aren’t optional — mistakes prevent real students from accessing aid
• Multi-touchpoint experiences spanning web applications, mobile, partner integrations, and support channels

What You’ll Do

This is a hands-on design leadership role — you’ll conduct user research, map journeys, design solutions, and lead design direction across teams. The specific tools or process doesn’t matter — we need designers who can ship experiences that work for real students. Tasks may include:

• Own design strategy for critical FAFSA features used by millions of families
• Conduct user research to understand where families struggle and why
• Map complex user journeys balancing policy constraints, user needs, and technical feasibility
• Design systems and patterns that enable consistent, accessible experiences across teams
• Align stakeholders across engineering, policy, legal, and leadership
• Remove blockers preventing teams from shipping

Who Succeeds Here

We’re looking for designers who’ve shipped at scale and led without authority — typically a strong Principal Designer at a top tech company or design leader at a high-growth startup, with experience in most of the following:

You won’t have direct reports, but you’ll advocate for users while steering cross-functional, cross-agency teams with engineering, policy, comms, contractor partners, and legal in the mix to solve the hardest problems.

• Owned design strategy and shipped features for systems serving millions of users
• Led cross-functional teams through ambiguous, complex design problems
• Made hard trade-off decisions balancing user needs, policy constraints, and technical feasibility
• Conducted user research that fundamentally changed what teams built
• Designed for accessibility as a core practice, ensuring compliance benefits real users

Reality Check

Compensation: This is a GS-15 position — the highest rung on the standard government pay scale and roughly equivalent to a Staff or Principal Designer at a top technology company. Full federal benefits included.

The Environment: You’ll face legacy systems, federal compliance, and change-resistant stakeholders. However, you own your design decisions — shaping strategy, influencing requirements, and driving change through consensus rather than permission.

The Impact: Your designs will impact more families than most consumer apps ever reach at one of the most consequential financial moments of their lives. Once you’re in, you have design autonomy rarely seen in government.

Interview Process

Our interview process is fully remote, consisting of 3-5 conversations that assess work experience, fit, and technical skills.