Company Description
Swiftly is on a mission to help cities move more efficiently. We are the leading transit data platform for agencies to share real-time passenger information, manage day-to-day operations, and improve service performance. Today, over 200 transit agencies in 12 countries – including LA Metro, MARTA, SEPTA, and MBTA – rely on Swiftly to improve on-time performance by up to 40% and increase passenger information accuracy by up to 50%. The result is better service reliability, increased ridership, and more efficient transit operations.
Even though Swiftly's HQ office is located in San Francisco, CA, we are open to candidates in most locations across the U.S. as well as Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. At this time we are unable to provide Visa sponsorship.
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 takes live operational signals — vehicle location, schedules, disruptions, and service changes — and turns them into reliable predictions and passenger-facing information that riders and agency staff can actually trust. The design work here is about building a real-time source of truth: the live map, next arrival times, service alerts, and the operational logic that keeps it all accurate.
The other role is focused on ridership and historical analysis. This team helps transit agencies understand how many people are riding, where, when, and what's changing. The design work is about taking messy historical data and turning it into clear, trustworthy analysis that planners and leaders can use to understand demand, justify decisions, and measure whether changes are working.
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 prototypes and high-fidelity designs.
- Partner with product managers and engineers to shape product strategy by visualizing problems and solutions.
- 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.
- Work alongside engineering during the build phase, acting as a quality check between what gets built and what users actually need.
- Contribute to Swiftly's design system and help raise the team's design foundation over time.
What Will Set You Up for Success
We're looking for a portfolio that shows craft and problem-solving — work you owned, showing how you moved from ambiguity to a clear outcome. B2B or enterprise experience will serve you well here. Swiftly's users are professionals with specific operational goals, and that shapes everything from how we frame problems to how we measure success. Be ready to speak to your process, your decisions, and the impact of your work.
You don't need to check every box. These describe the full range across both roles; we don't expect one person to bring all of it.
You'll thrive here if you bring the following:
- 8+ years of product design experience, with a track record of taking complex products from conception to completion.
- You use AI tools to prototype with production-level code, moving fast to test ideas at real fidelity — and you still sweat the details on the canvas, getting every pixel right when it matters.
- Experience in complex domains: operational software, data-dense interfaces, or products where understanding the underlying logic is part of the design work. Comfort with automation and trigger-based systems is a strong signal.
- Comfort with data visualization and analytical UX: dashboards, reporting, and exploratory analysis. An interest in designing for open-ended, user-driven outputs — including AI-assisted or prompt-to-output paradigms — matters here, even without direct experience.
- An eye for how flows fit together across a product area and how software decisions play out in the real world. Service design methods (blueprints, journey mapping) help; coherence across touchpoints and teams is the point.
- Strong user research skills: knowing which method to use, interviewing well, and turning findings into decisions rather than documents.
- You shape direction, not just execute a brief. You help scope problems, set what success looks like with product and engineering, and turn research into strategy that reaches adjacent flows and the design system.
- You lift the designers around you through direct, specific feedback and mentorship, raising the standard of the work near you — not only your own.
- You articulate and defend design decisions to engineers, product managers, and stakeholders, and change your mind when the evidence shifts.