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  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.

• Define and maintain a clear UX vision and set of guiding principles aligned with Life Raft'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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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…