Manager, UX Design & Research Operations

Nationwide is seeking a Manager, UX Design & Research Operations to lead the operational backbone of our design and research practice. This role is critical to scaling user experience excellence across Nationwide’s digital ecosystem, ensuring that our design system and research operations deliver consistent, accessible, and high-quality experiences for our UX designers, researchers, and technology partners.

• Lead and manage the design system delivery team (designers, design engineers) as well as the Research Operations Coordinators and researchers, providing day‑to‑day direction, prioritization, and coaching.
• Run the operational cadence for the design system—intake, backlog grooming, sprint planning, status/scorecards—ensuring continuous delivery of new components, enhancements, and defect fixes across supported platforms.
• Partner with Practice Leads to translate enterprise priorities into a clear, sequenced roadmap for Design & Research Operations (onboarding, accessibility, research support, participant recruiting, tooling, AI‑powered UX, and global UX enablement).
• Coordinate work with the Nationwide India Office by standing up shared workflows, onboarding programs, and governance so offshore UX and engineering teams can adopt our design system, research tools, and UX practices consistently, with clear SLAs, rituals, and feedback loops.
• Drive Design Ops and Research Ops maturity and governance by standardizing processes, documentation, metrics, and quality checks that amplify the value of Bolt and UX research, ensuring consistency, accessibility, and compliance at scale.
• Provide people leadership and talent development for Bolt designers, UI engineers, Research Ops coordinators, and at least one researcher, including performance management, growth planning, and hiring to support an expanding portfolio of 200+ applications and about 100 designers and researchers consuming our design system and ReOps services.

• 5+ years in UX, Design and/or Research Operations, or related fields, with at least 1 year in a leadership or management role.
• Strong understanding of design systems, UX research operations, and agile delivery practices; ability to manage cross‑functional teams and complex workflows.
• Familiarity with design tools (Figma), research platforms (Dscout, User Interviews), component libraries, accessibility standards (WCAG), and collaboration platforms (Jira); experience preparing design systems and operations for AI‑enabled workflows.
• Proven ability to coach and develop talent, foster collaboration, and drive operational excellence.
• Exceptional ability to translate strategic priorities into actionable plans and communicate effectively with stakeholders across design, engineering, and product.
• Experience working with distributed teams and managing workflows across multiple time zones.

• This role does not qualify for employer-sponsored work authorization. Nationwide does not participate in the STEM OPT Extension program.
• Due to the nature of this role, candidates must be hybrid to the Columbus offices.

National salary range for Manager, User

Experience:

$ – $. Expected starting salary range: $ – $.

Nationwide is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone feels challenged, appreciated, respected, and engaged. Nationwide prohibits discrimination and harassment and affords equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable law.