Senior UX Designer (Research & AI)

About The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior UX Designer with strong craft, solid research practice, and real experience building AI-powered products. UX research is a core part of this role. You will plan and run studies with domain experts, turning what you learn into clear design decisions. You will also shape how energy analysts, grid planners, and market traders use our simulation and data tools, working closely with product managers, engineers, and domain experts.

UX Research

Research is a key output of this role, not just a supporting task. You will lead the research program for your product areas, working closely with product and engineering teams.

Research Methods

• In-depth interviews and contextual inquiry: one-on-one sessions with energy modelers, traders, grid operators, and regulators to understand their goals, workflows, and pain points.
• Moderated usability testing: task-based sessions on prototypes or live builds to find friction points, comprehension gaps, and usability issues.
• Surveys and concept testing: structured questionnaires to check assumptions and measure satisfaction (CSAT, SUS, NPS) before committing to a full design.
• Card sorting and tree testing: validate the information architecture and navigation of complex platforms like PLEXOS Cloud.
• Heuristic evaluation: structured reviews against Nielsen's 10 heuristics and WCAG 2.1 to find issues without needing participant sessions.
• Pendo analytics: use real product usage data to spot adoption gaps, drop-off points, and friction areas, then connect those findings with qualitative research.

Research Activities

• Plan and facilitate: write research plans and discussion guides, recruit participants from Energy Exemplar's customer base, and run sessions with energy domain experts.
• Synthesize: use affinity mapping and thematic analysis to turn raw data into clear insights, separating symptoms from root causes.
• Share findings: write concise reports with clear recommendations and present them in team reviews and stakeholder meetings.

Research Planning

• Keep a rolling quarterly research plan that is aligned to the product roadmap, with studies prioritized by impact and risk.
• Balance discovery research and evaluative research: know when a full study is needed versus a quick concept test. Manage time constraints and select the appropriate research method.

What You Will Do

• Own end-to-end UX across PLEXOS Cloud, PLEXOS Desktop, Aurora, Adapt2, and PLEXOS Intelligence, from discovery through to delivery and iteration.
• Apply UX heuristics in a practical way: reduce cognitive load in dashboards, simulation builders, and data visualizations.
• Design AI-native experiences: conversational interfaces, copilot features, intelligent recommendations, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Use vibe-coding in your day-to-day work: tools like Figma Make, Claude, GitHub Copilot, and VSCode with Opencode to prototype fast and make UX changes directly in dev environments.
• Maintain the design system: keep component libraries, interaction patterns, and design tokens consistent across products in Figma.
• Turn complex data into clear visuals: design charts, scenario comparison views, time-series dashboards, and simulation result displays.
• Work cross-functionally: collaborate with engineering, data science, product, and customer success to ship designs that are practical, tested, and aligned to business goals.

Required Qualifications

• 5-8 years of UX design experience with a portfolio that shows research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design. Expert in Figma.
• Strong knowledge of UX heuristics and design principles, with the ability to apply them to real design decisions and reviews.
• Hands-on experience with AI design and coding tools: Figma Make, Claude, GitHub Copilot, VSCode with Opencode, or similar.
• Experience designing complex data visualizations for expert B2B users: dashboards, time-series charts, and scenario comparison tools.
• Has designed AI-native features such as copilots, intelligent automation, generative UI, or recommendation systems.
• Design systems experience: component libraries, design tokens, variants, auto-layout, and engineering handoff in Figma.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background designing cloud-native SaaS platforms for technical users or domain experts.
• Front-end literacy: comfortable reading and writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript alongside engineers.
• Nice to have: some familiarity with energy market concepts such as electricity dispatch, capacity planning, grid topology, or commodity trading.

What We Offer

• Meaningful work: your designs will shape how energy markets are planned around the world, supporting the move to clean energy.
• AI-forward culture: PLEXOS Intelligence is a core investment and you will be working on the front line of AI product development.
  
• Global team: colleagues across the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia in a fast-growing and collaborative environment.
• Learning and growth: domain training via Energy Exemplar's Xpert platform, conference attendance, and mentorship from product and engineering leaders.