Senior Manager UX Designer

About us Appnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that combines Strategy, Experience & Design, Engineering and Managed Services. We build digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as foundations for future growth. Bold ambition.

Practical action. Endless possibilities.

About The Role

Join forces with Appnovation to deliver high-impact results for one of our key strategic partners - a global leader in their field. This engagement offers a unique vantage point into a world-class organization with exceptional opportunities for professional growth and long-term career advancement. At our partner organization, the mission is to create breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, and the company has recently rebuilt its entire technology operating model to deliver on it.

The organization is becoming AI-native and agentic-supported, putting enterprise AI platforms in the hands of all 80,000 colleagues, moving decisions closest to the work, and driving a deeper level of federation than most industry peers. For a designer, this is a rare, career-defining moment: a historic 177-year-old company rewiring itself around AI, feedback loops measured in days, and design decisions that shape how an entire company works and how medicines reach patients. We are seeking a Senior Manager, AI-First Design to drive the design of the platforms this transformation runs on.

This is an individual contributor role with real authority over the work. You will drive products from inside the cross-functional team, sitting with engineers and product owners daily to shape scope, define priorities, and push concepts to working proofs in days rather than weeks. You will personally deliver the work, own specific pattern areas of the AI-first design system, and ship them as code into the engineering build pipeline so the correct, compliant pattern is delivered by default.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-On Design Partnership: Act as a vocal, engaged, and proactive design partner within a cross-functional team (engineers, strategists, product), delivering rapid prototypes that solve complex business problems. Agentic & Conversational Leadership: Lead the design of Agentic AI experiences (systems that plan, make decisions, call tools, and complete multi-step workflows with humans in the loop) and own Conversational UX end-to-end. Assistant Behavior Design: Design and document assistant behaviors, including tone and voice, grounded responses, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and trust-building interaction patterns.

Design System Pattern Ownership: Own specific pattern areas of the AI-first design system (assistant UI components, conversation templates, disclosure components, escalation patterns) and ship them as code into the engineering build pipeline. Agent Simulation & LLM Collaboration: Create interactive prototypes that simulate agent behavior to validate workflows and risks quickly, partnering closely with Engineering, Data, and AI teams on LLM-enabled experiences. QA & Guardrail Management: Maintain the reference library behind automated design quality checks, including voice patterns, disclosure templates, accessibility checks, and regulated-content guardrails.

Pattern Adoption & Standards Drift: Monitor pattern usage, override rates, and exception requests for your assigned surfaces; surface standards drift and refine system-wide standards based on real-world data. Playbooks & Libraries: Create reusable playbooks and pattern libraries for agentic workflows and conversational design (escalation, repair, safety responses, approvals, and multi-step task orchestration). Enablement & Mentorship: Proactively train and informally mentor peer designers and cross-functional partners on the rapid prototyping process, AI tools, and design system integration.