[Hiring] Senior Manager, User Experience @Appfire

Role Description

Plenty of companies call themselves user-centered. 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.
• 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 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.
• Jobs to be Done, in practice: Coaching the team to run documentary-style timeline interviews.
• AI-driven UX: Defining interaction patterns, principles, and guardrails for AI capability.
• The relationship with Engineering and Product: Handoff standards, technical documentation, and discussing job stories.
• Research that changes decisions: Defining research standards, methods, and tooling for the discipline.
• The discipline's operating system: Design Operations and Research Operations.
• The team: Hiring, onboarding, performance, and growth.
• Facilitation: Running discovery workshops, co-design sessions, and prioritization exercises.

What success looks like

• A clear UX strategy and operating rhythm in place.
• 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.
• A UX team that leverages AI in their day-to-day work.
• UX metrics defined, tracked, and reported credibly at the leadership level.
• A career framework that reflects how the discipline actually works now.
• Measurably stronger output: better craft, faster evidence, less rework.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of substantial experience in UX with genuine depth in both user research and product design.
• At least 5 years managing designers and/or researchers directly.
• Hands-on Jobs to be Done experience.
• Hands-on experience designing or leading design for AI or ML-powered features.
• Deep command of research methodology.
• Strong design craft: information architecture, interaction design, prototyping.
• Experience defining outcome-based UX metrics.
• Real fluency in how design and engineering hand off to each other inside an Agile environment.
• Comfort with ambiguity.
• B2B or enterprise SaaS experience.
• Strong workshop design and facilitation skills.
• Experience working directly with high-profile or strategic customers.

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 leveling criteria.
• Background contributing to an accessibility conformance program.
• Fluency with participatory and generative methods.

Benefits

• Equity: Every Appfire team member is eligible for company equity.
• Time Off & Wellbeing: 26 paid vacation days annually, 12 Wellness Days, and 24 hours of paid volunteer time.
• Learning & Development: Grow with Appfire University.
• Health & Lifestyle: Private health insurance and Multisport Card.
• Transportation: Fully paid Sofia City Transport Card for employees in Sofia.
• Family Support: One-time net Baby Bonus upon the birth of a child.
• Flexibility: This role is fully remote within Bulgaria.