Director, UX

Liferaft is looking for a highly skilled and visionary Director of UX to establish and scale a world-class user experience across the platform. This role will be hybrid in Halifax, NS, or fully remote within Ontario.

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you will be accountable for establishing UX as a first-class, outcome-driven capability at Liferaft. You will own the end-to-end usability of the product, ensuring interaction design, workflows, and overall user experience scale coherently as the platform grows in power and complexity. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role that balances strategic ownership with practical execution.

What you do as the Director, UX at Liferaft

Core Responsibilities

• Define and maintain a clear UX vision and set of guiding principles aligned with LifeRaft's product strategy.
• Own end-to-end usability outcomes across the product, independent of individual feature teams.
• Establish and govern interaction patterns, workflows, and design standards.
• Ensure UX work stays ahead of engineering delivery to prevent bottlenecks.
• Partner with Product Management to translate problems and outcomes into usable solutions.
• Partner with Engineering leadership to ensure UX solutions are technically feasible and efficiently delivered.
• Prioritize UX work across pods in alignment with quarterly planning and delivery sequencing.
• Identify, track, and reduce UX debt over time.
• Coach and mentor designers, PMs, and engineers in UX thinking and best practices.

Operational Responsibilities

• Participate in quarterly planning and relevant backlog refinement sessions.
• Coordinate UX work with Program Management to align dependencies and sequencing.
• Review and approve UX designs to ensure consistency and quality.
• Balance near-term delivery needs with longer-term UX coherence.

What You Need to Get the Job Done

Required Experience & Skills

• 10+ years of professional experience in UX design, interaction design, or product design, with at least 5 years in a senior or leadership capacity.
• Demonstrated experience owning end-to-end usability across a complex, multi-workflow SaaS product.
• Proven ability to define and operationalize a coherent UX vision that scales across teams and over time.
• Strong hands-on design skills, including interaction design, workflow modeling, and usability-driven problem solving.
• Experience establishing and governing design systems, interaction patterns, and UX standards.
• Track record of partnering closely with Product Management to translate customer problems and desired outcomes into effective solutions.
• Deep experience collaborating with Engineering leaders to ensure designs are technically feasible, efficient to implement, and delivered on time.
• Experience working in agile or scaled agile environments, including quarterly planning and cross-team dependency management.
• Strong ability to prioritize UX work across multiple teams and initiatives, balancing near-term delivery with long-term coherence.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence without authority and align diverse stakeholders around UX outcomes.

Leadership & Coaching

• Experience mentoring and coaching designers, product managers, and engineers in UX principles and best practices.
• Comfortable acting as a player–coach: setting direction, reviewing work, and personally contributing to critical UX efforts.
• Ability to raise the UX bar across an organization through feedback, standards, and shared understanding.

Preferred / Bonus Experience

• Experience working on data-rich, analytics-heavy, or investigation-driven products.
• Familiarity with identifying, tracking, and systematically reducing UX debt.
• Experience working in B2B or enterprise SaaS environments with complex user roles and workflows.
• Background in user research, usability testing, or customer discovery methods.

Why Liferaft?

We pride ourselves on our innovative spirit and determination to help solve new challenges developed by the complexities of open source data. Liferaft provides a threat intelligence and investigations platform to corporate security teams around the world, including some of the biggest brands you've probably referenced today Liferaft is designed to identify, track, and validate issues from open source channels (surface, deep web, and darknet) related to executive safety, fraud prevention, and asset & infrastructure protection. Our technology is helping keep these companies, their people, and their operations safe – making a real impact in the world we all live in.

The diversity of our team is integral to our success. We are a team of passionate and supportive individuals and pride ourselves in fostering a collaborative, innovative, and fun culture. 

We offer our team:

• Competitive compensation plan 
• Flexible PTO – Take a minimum of 15 days/year with no cap beyond
• Health & Dental Benefits (Medavie Blue Cross)
  • 100% employer-paid dental coverage for employees and dependents
  • Orthodontic coverage for minor dependents
  • Comprehensive mental health coverage — up to $3,000 per month, available for both employees and dependents
  • Free access to EAP, Greenshield and a variety of physical and mental health services via wellness platform
• Remote-first workplace with optional access to office space and flexible working hours
• Investment in personal and professional growth
• $750 Yearly Lifestyle Subsidy
• Monthly cell phone reimbursement
• Monthly parking reimbursement
• Company-sponsored social events and team-building activities
• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee
• Authentic, engaged team, who value work life balance

We're building a company future generations can be proud of. Diversity at Liferaft  means fostering a workplace in which individual differences are recognized, appreciated, respected and responded to in ways that fully develop and utilize each person's talents and strengths. We welcome all qualified applicants regardless of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, or any other protected characteristic.