Senior UX Designer

Senior UX Designer

Are you passionate about building great user experiences? Do you want to help shape the future of our homes?

Nabu Casa is looking for a Senior User Experience Designer to join our Product & Design team full-time, working primarily on Home Assistant, to help us turn our vision into tangible prototypes, and create intuitive and friendly user experiences for the smart homes of our users.

As one of the most active open-source projects in the world, Home Assistant powers over 1 million households globally, providing the smarts — convenience, comfort, security, personalization, and more — to our users' homes by automating, monitoring, and providing control of their devices. We are dedicated to achieving our Open Home vision — a smart home built on privacy, choice, and sustainability.

The Product & Design team at Nabu Casa helps us see the future of the Home Assistant project and lead us there. We manage our product roadmap as well as the alignment, discovery, ideation, design, and validation phases of each product, while we work with our engineering team for implementation and our marketing team for launch. Founded last year, our team has been working hard to steer the Home Assistant project towards a user experience that is both powerful for our advanced users and intuitive for other users in their houses.

Unlike other corporate or startup positions, we are the active maintainers of our project and its open source community. We work transparently and we communicate with our contributors and users often and keep them informed and aligned with our directions and progress. You have easy access to our users for collecting feedback and testing for validation at any time through our forums. You will work with engineers within Nabu Casa as well as contributors in our community to bring your designs to reality.

• Design: Develop interaction models, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes, screen flows, and storyboards. Structure content with effective information architecture to help users orient and navigate in our apps. Make user-centric design decisions.
• Research synthesis: Collaborate with our UX researcher to define our product research goals and process. Synthesize our research and decide the best design methodologies and tools for each scenario, such as user personas or archetypes, heuristic analysis, journey maps or service blueprints.
• Ideation: Harness the creativity of your colleagues and lead design workshops and design sprints to generate new ideas for our products.
• Validation: Test and validate to optimize product design and functionality. Analyze data about users with test results and alter designs accordingly.
• Cross-team collaboration: Communicate design ideas and concepts while collaborating with colleagues across different disciplines. Ask the right questions to move the design forward and collect feedback. Check-in with stakeholders often and keep them informed. Work with our product managers to help define product requirements and be able to make compromises between feasibility, viability, and desirability of a user experience.
• User and design advocacy: Be our go-to design expert of a product. Be the champion of user-centered design principles throughout the organization. Promote design consistency in our nascent design system.
• Open source collaboration: Collaborate with community contributors on our products. Review and improve their contributions with better designs.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest UX design methodologies, industry trends, and best practices, and proactively apply them to enhance our design processes and deliverables.

• Mastery of Figma: Know the best practices and be skillful at how to use essential and advanced Figma features such as creating autolayout, design libraries, dev mode, prototyping tools, components and their variants, text and color styles, variables, and various plugins.
• Design thinking skills: The ability to solve problems using the best design methodologies and tools, whether it is cognitive, strategic, or practical, at each stage of the product development lifecycle. 
• Self-driven: Know how to become the design owner of a particular product area. Be proactive in improving our products and our design process.
• User-driven: Have empathy for our users. Know the importance of speaking to users often. Understand and document user research findings and iterate. Know the right user research tool to use and the right UX tools to analyze the findings.
• Craftsmanship: Possess a keen eye for design details and aesthetics, ensuring precise alignment and consistency across all design elements and micro-interactions. Have a good understanding in typography, color theory, grid systems, and composition.
• Smart home knowledge: Have a good understanding of the world of home automation. Share our values of the Open Home - privacy, choice, and sustainability. Better yet, you have already built an extensive smart home using Home Assistant or other home automation software.
• Knowledge in accessibility standards: Deliver user experiences that are easy to use across a range of formats by all users, including those with disabilities.
• Basic understanding of software development: Understand what frontend and backend developers need to implement your designs, and understand how computers generally work.
• Fluency in English.

In addition, we would like to receive a (link to a) portfolio of your work with your application.

• Affinity with open-source development: Have experience contributing to open source projects and engaging with their communities.
• Software experience: Have used creative web development software such as Webflow, ProtoPie, PenPot, LottieFiles, and Spline; collaboration software such as GitHub, ClickUp, Google Workspace, and Google Meet; and design software such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
• Coding skills: Have basic frontend development knowledge such as how to code in HTML, CSS, and simple Javascript. With the ability to read and write YAML files.
• Experience with UX in different design mediums: Experience with desktop dashboard is a plus, along with mobile, wearables, voice, e-ink displays, and/or assistive devices.
• Background in architecture or interior design: A holistic understanding of how people live and interact with the architectural spaces in their homes is a plus.
• Experience in data visualization

If you do not perfectly match this profile, but are an active member of the Home Assistant community, we'd still love to hear from you!

Nabu Casa is a fully remote company that uses Remote to employ people from all over the world. You will be a normal salaried employee in your country, and no work visa is required.

This is a full-time position for 40 hours per week. Because we are a fully remote company, there is no fixed schedule. For the purpose of team communication, we do try to ensure at least 3 hours of overlap in the workday. You will be part of the Product & Design team, and your team manager is based in the Eastern time zone (UTC-04:00) in the United States.

Core to the establishment of Nabu Casa was the well-being of the people building Home Assistant. We will provide all the benefits required by the country you reside in. However, we also want to make sure all our employees, regardless of country of origin, get at least a minimal set of benefits, including:

• Five weeks (twenty-five days) of paid time off.
• Fourteen days of paid sick leave if your country/laws treat them as unpaid.
• Six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid parental leave to be used in the first year after birth. We will provide the missing days if your country/laws do not provide such compensation.
• A budget to equip your home workspace once you start. After three years, you may keep this equipment for personal use.
• A monthly smart home budget to ensure you keep up-to-date with the latest that smart homes offer.
• A 50% contribution to your internet connection fee at your home workspace.
• If you are currently working on Home Assistant-related side projects, you can spend work time maintaining it.

Nabu Casa is best known as the organization driving the development of Home Assistant, the world's largest free and open-source smart home platform. More than one million households benefit from its home automation capabilities. Powered by a worldwide community of open-source developers, GitHub ranked it the second most active open-source project in the world in 2023.

We were initially founded to ensure that the development of Home Assistant would remain sustainable as it kept growing, but over time it has grown to support more open home initiatives. In 2024, the Open Home Foundation was formed to protect these open-source projects and ensure they thrive into the future. Nabu Casa is a commercial partner of the Foundation, and our principals are aligned with a joint commitment to privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home. These are the values that we put at the heart of every decision we make. It's woven into our architecture, licensing, community, and everything else.

Nabu Casa is profitable, has no external investors, and our only funding comes from people subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud and buying Home Assistant hardware. That means the only stakeholders we have to concern ourselves with are our employees and our users. We now employ more than 30 contributors from all over the world to make sure they have the financial freedom to focus on Home Assistant and other open-source projects that help drive the Open Home vision. 

Other Open Home Foundation projects and collaborations supported by Nabu Casa include:

• Open hardware tools (e.g., ESPHome, ESP Web Tools)
• Open standards (e.g., Python Matter Server, Z-Wave JS, ZigPy, BTHome, Improv Wi-Fi)
• Open voice (e.g., Rhasspy, Wyoming Protocol, Piper)

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