The posting
Role: UX Designer Team: User Experience Scope: Individual Contributor, P4 Years of Experience: 7+ years Location: Ventura, CA (Hybrid)
Overview
As a UX Designer at Patagonia, you’ll play a key role in the design of complex digital experiences that support our purpose: We’re in business to save our home planet. In this role, you’ll bring advanced UX craft, mature product judgment, and the ability to translate ambiguous business and user needs into clear, scalable design direction. You’ll support our Sr. UX Designers and Creative Leadership in shaping the approach for undefined problem spaces, and create thoughtful experiences that balance user needs, business goals, technical constraints, accessibility, and environmental responsibility.
You’ll work across product areas where needs are nuanced, information may be incomplete, and the path forward requires sound judgment. You’ll use sophisticated research, analytical, and systems-thinking approaches to identify root causes, evaluate tradeoffs, and recommend design solutions that can scale across channels, platforms, and moments in the customer journey. Your work will be hands-on and executional, but will also include strategy, alignment, and key decision points.
This role also requires strong cross-functional influence. You’ll build trusted relationships with partners across the company, including senior stakeholders and teams who may not be fluent in UX. You’ll frame design decisions clearly, facilitate alignment through ambiguity, and help teams make principled choices that improve the overall experience.
What You’ll Do
- Contribute to UX design strategy and execution across complex, cross-functional initiatives, from discovery and problem framing through final delivery.
- Translate ambiguous user needs, business goals, technical constraints, and Patagonia’s mission into clear experience strategies and practical design solutions.
- Define and evolve design approaches, frameworks, and interaction patterns for new or changing contexts, using judgment to determine when to extend existing patterns versus create new ones.
- Create user flows, wireframes, prototypes, service moments, and interaction models that bring clarity to complicated systems and support intuitive, accessible experiences.
- Partner on user research, usability testing, concept validation, and synthesis; translate findings into actionable recommendations that influence product direction.
- Partner closely with product managers, engineers, researchers, brand teams, and sustainability experts to align priorities, make tradeoff decisions, and deliver high-quality outcomes.
- Communicate design rationale with clarity and confidence to stakeholders at multiple levels, including senior partners and non-design audiences.
- Facilitate design reviews, working sessions, and decision-making conversations that help teams move from divergent perspectives toward shared direction.
- Contribute to and help evolve our design system, ensuring consistency, usability, accessibility, and long-term maintainability across product areas.
- Advocate for responsible design practices that minimize harm, support inclusion, and reflect Patagonia’s values.
Who You Are
- Strategic and analytical: You can evaluate complex information, identify root causes, connect patterns across systems, and make well-reasoned decisions when precedent is limited.
- Effective communicator: You adapt your communication style to different audiences, including senior partners and non-design stakeholders, and can advise, persuade, and educate others through challenging design decisions.
- Collaborative: You build trust, navigate differing perspectives, facilitate alignment, and help cross-functional teams make progress without relying on formal authority.
- Craft-driven systems thinker: You bring strong interaction design, prototyping, accessibility, and usability expertise, and understand how individual design choices contribute to larger experience ecosystems.
- Self-directed and adaptable: You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, setting direction, managing competing priorities, and knowing when to seek input or escalate decisions.
- Mission-driven: You are motivated by work that serves people and the planet and bring curiosity, care, and accountability to how that work gets done.
Leadership Expectations – Leading Self
- Build People + Teams: Build strong relationships, communicates clearly, seeks feedback, and recognizes others’ contributions.
- Drive Results: Deliver quality work, persists through obstacles, and follows through on commitments.
- Demonstrate Good Judgment: Connect work to broader goals, makes sound decisions, and learns quickly from experience.
- Champion Vision + Purpose: Connect daily work to Patagonia’s purpose and models Core Values in how work gets done.
Experience You Bring
- 7+ years of UX design experience, including ownership of complex digital product or service experiences from discovery through delivery.
- Portfolio demonstrating advanced UX craft, strong product thinking, clear problem framing, and the ability to apply UX principles, methods, and best practices flexibly in ambiguous or unusual circumstances.
- Work that demonstrates strong interaction design, systems thinking, information architecture, and the ability to simplify complexity across connected experiences.
- Experience creating user flows, wireframes, prototypes, journey maps, and interaction patterns for complex digital experiences, ideally across multiple channels or product areas.
- Proficiency with modern design and prototyping tools such as Figma, with openness to emerging AI-enabled tools such as Claude where they improve research synthesis, ideation, or workflow efficiency.
- Strong understanding of responsive design, accessibility, usability standards, and inclusive design practices.
- Experience leading or partnering on qualitative and quantitative research, usability testing, concept validation, and synthesis, and translating findings into prioritized design recommendations.
- Experience influencing product direction through design rationale, stakeholder facilitation, evidence-based recommendations, and clear storytelling.
- Experience collaborating closely with product management, engineering, research, brand, analytics, and business partners to balance user needs, operational realities, and technical feasibility.
- Preferred experience designing for e-commerce, retail, marketplaces, loyalty, content, or other complex digital ecosystems.
- Preferred experience contributing to design systems at scale, including pattern governance, documentation, and cross-team adoption.
- Preferred exposure to sustainability-focused, purpose-driven, or values-led organizations.
Hiring Range: $115,000–$123,000 USD Annual
At Patagonia, pay ranges are assigned to a job based on the location specific market median of similar jobs according to 3rd party salary benchmark surveys. Individual pay within that range can vary for several reasons including skills/capabilities, experience, and available budget.
Benefits
Patagonia offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, retirement and leave of absence plans. Benefit plans may vary slightly depending on the nature of your employment.
Workplace Location Overview
This position is Hybrid, with a standard schedule of Tuesday–Thursday on-site and remote work on other days. Occasional additional office visits may be required for team events or critical meetings.
Employee Conduct
It is the responsibility of every employee to contribute to a positive, inclusive work environment through cooperative and professional interactions with co-workers, customers and vendors.
Equal Employment Opportunity
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other factors prohibited by law.
