Senior UX Designer - AI - IC

Senior UX Designer

Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

We're looking for a Senior UX Designer to shape Ask AI and Generative AI experiences that help users solve real problems through chat centric and multimodal interactions. You'll own the end-to-end UX-interaction models, UI patterns, agent behaviors and boundaries, and the surrounding product surfaces-while partnering very closely with a Conversational Designer who owns the dialog strategy, language, and tone centric and multimodal to end UX centric and multimodal to end UX.

This is a fast paced, time sensitive role where you'll work hand in hand with Product, Engineering, AI/ML, and Conversational Design to move from concept to learning quickly, balancing velocity and responsibility in a space that's evolving rapidly, paced, time sensitive in hand with paced.

This role does not write conversational scripts or dialog. It does translate conversation strategies into effective UX patterns and interfaces that make AI interactions clear, trustworthy, and actionable.

Primary Responsibilities:

• AI Experience & Interaction Design
  • Design Generative AI chat and Ask AI experiences from an interaction and UX systems perspective
  • Own the surrounding UI and experience layer for chat: task panels, summaries, followups, action bars, results views, history, and controls
  • Define agent behaviors, capabilities, and boundaries in the UX (when AI offers suggestions, asks for clarification, or escalates), ensuring users remain in control
  • Translate conversation strategies (provided by Conversational Designers) into scalable UX patterns, clear affordances, and actionable response formats (e.g., cards, checklists, tables, next steps)
  • Design trust and transparency mechanisms: explainability cues, citations, confidence indicators, limits and safety constraints, and retry/feedback pathways
• Systems Thinking & End-to-End Journeys
  • Create end-to-end AI user journeys and interaction models for chat-first and hybrid UI patterns
  • Model states and contingencies: uncertainty, partial knowledge, hallucination handling, latency, empty/error/edge states
  • Define handoffs and escalation paths (to human agents, to other product workflows, or to advanced tools) and design recovery mechanisms
  • Ensure mental models are clear about what the AI can/can't do, and how it learns or adapts over time
• Rapid Iteration & Validation
  • Rapidly prototype in Figma (flows, states, components) and collaborate with Engineering for feasibility checks
  • Use usability testing, design reviews, pilots, and lightweight experiments to validate comprehension, trust, and actionability
  • Iterate quickly using analytics, VoC, support signals, and A/B tests; instrument key UX metrics (e.g., task completion, time to value, deflection, satisfaction)
  • Balance speed and rigor, knowing when fidelity and depth are needed versus scrappy learning
• Collaboration & Delivery
  • Partner with Conversational Designers (dialog, tone, conversation structure) to ensure cohesive experiences-the UX/UI reinforces the conversational intent
  • Work closely with Product and Engineering to scope, sequence, and deliver time-sensitive milestones; remove ambiguity with clear artifacts and decisions
  • Collaborate with AI/ML teams to understand model behavior, constraints (latency, context windows, accuracy), and design appropriate controls and fallbacks
  • Contribute to roadmaps and release planning, ensuring design dependencies and risks are visible early
• Responsible & Scalable AI
  • Uphold responsible AI practices-transparency, user consent, recoverability, human-in-the-loop, and safe defaults
  • Advocate for accessibility (WCAG), inclusive design, and responsiveness across devices and modalities
  • Contribute to AI design systems: reusable patterns for prompts, responses, feedback, explainability, and safety messaging; partner with the core Design System team for componentization and governance
  • Design for regulated environments (privacy, consent, auditability) and align with AI governance guidelines

Required Qualifications:

• 6+ years in UX/Product Design with shipped work in complex or emerging interaction models
• 2+ years of experience working in AI assisted or assistant like experiences, systems thinking, and data dense UI or workflow design assisted
• Experience collaborating closely with Conversational Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers in agile environments
• Manager: Experience managing or mentoring designers
• Proficiency with Figma for fast prototyping and component based design
• Strength in interaction design, information architecture, and design systems
• Practice with usability testing and evidence based iteration (qual + quant)
• Demonstrated ability to communicate design decisions, tradeoffs, and rationale clearly across functions

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Generative AI products: chat/assistants, agentic workflows, or tool use interfaces use
• Experience in regulated domains (e.g., healthcare, finance) with awareness of privacy/consent and traceability requirements
• Exposure to multimodal UX (text, voice, images) and cross surface orchestration surface
• Working knowledge (designer level) of LLMs, agent architectures, prompt patterns, tool/function calling, and evaluation/confidence signaling (at a conceptual level; no model building required)
• Familiarity with instrumentation & experimentation (e.g., event taxonomies, A/B tests) to support rapid learning