Design at Swiftly

In the government software world, the focus has been pure function at the expense of usability. At Swiftly, we believe great products are both powerfully functional and well designed. We bring consumer software sensibilities to transit: experiences that flow, features that are easy to use, and work that is squarely aimed at real customer problems.

Our designers work closely with product and engineering from the start, often prototyping directly within the product rather than handing off from the side. What we design affects whether a rider trusts the information at their stop, whether a planner can justify a route change, whether an operator catches a problem before it compounds. We're a low-ego team that hires people with strong convictions held loosely — in service of finding the best solution rather than winning the argument.

 About the Role

We're hiring two Senior Product Designers for two distinct problem spaces.

One role is focused on real-time passenger information. This team owns products for producing ETA predictions, disruption information such as detours, and service alerts that appear in rider-facing apps (e.g., Google Maps). The key design challenges on this team are making complex workflows easy to execute and converting nuanced technical information into clear insights. Agency staff often manage disruptions during emergencies, so drawing a detour or sending an alert has to take seconds. Looking ahead, the team is designing automated workflows in which the system detects the disruption, proposes a fix, and the dispatcher decides.

The other role focuses on our administration experience, in which an agency sets up its personnel and equipment. The design challenges are ones of scale, from giving each person access to exactly the data they should see, to configuring hundreds of onboard devices without visiting them one at a time. One of those devices announces the next stop out loud, which means designing how a street name gets pronounced and when a rider hears it. Little of this exists today, so you would set the pattern the rest of the platform follows.

What You'll Do

Across both roles, you will:

• Design software for transit agency staff across the full product cycle, from discovery and research through to prototypes and high-fidelity designs.
• Lead as an equal partner to your product and engineering counterparts. Help decide what the team builds, make the case for user-centered decisions with evidence, and hold the line on quality under pressure to ship.
• Plan and lead user research (interviews, usability tests, synthesis) and communicate findings in ways that change decisions.
• Design for the real-world context your work lands in, including the operational workflows and service outcomes that connect to the software.
• Stay embedded through the build, keeping the team honest about what users need as tradeoffs get made.
• Contribute to Swiftly's design system and help raise the team's design foundation over time.