Design Research Jobs in Seattle, WA (NOW HIRING)

Job Description:

At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better through the power of every connection. We do this by driving Responsible Growth and delivering for our clients, teammates, communities and shareholders every day.
Being a Great Place to Work and providing a culture of caring is core to how we drive Responsible Growth. We are intentional about fostering an inclusive workplace where every teammate has the opportunity to succeed, build a career and contribute to our shared success. This includes attracting and developing exceptional talent, recognizing and rewarding performance, and supporting our teammates' physical, emotional, and financial wellness through affordable, competitive and flexible benefits.
We value the unique perspectives individuals bring from all backgrounds and career paths - whether shaped by military service, community college education, or a wide range of work and life experiences. These journeys foster resilience, leadership and innovation, strengthening our workforce and positively impact the communities we serve.
Bank of America is committed to an in-office culture that supports collaboration, engagement, and career development. Our approach includes clear in-office expectations, while providing an appropriate level of flexibility based on role-specific responsibilities and business needs.
At Bank of America, you can build a successful career with opportunities to learn, grow, and make an impact. Join us!

Bank of America's Experience Design (XD) team creates world-class end-to-end digital experiences that are intuitive, innovative, engaging, and inclusive. We are a multi-disciplinary design organization with expertise across product design, content design, design research, design operations, and design technology. The team is constantly defining, iterating, solving problems, and working together to find ways all our digital platforms can empower customers to reach their financial goals by designing and delivering next-level experiences that provide ease, convenience and safety while matching to individual needs and preferences.

Bank of America is looking for an Experience Designer (XD) III that will be responsible for leading the vision and team understanding of how users interact with our digital capabilities, complex flows and multi-feature designs, components, and patterns across multiple initiatives.

The role will be an AI-first senior individual contributor on an interdisciplinary product design team, directly accountable for delivering both strategic and tactical solutions that support our digital platforms and experiences across large-scale, complex, and multi-feature initiatives. Success in this role requires a deep understanding of foundational user needs, behaviors, and motivations across a portfolio of related investments and programs. The role spans user research, behavioral insights, data analytics, and product development experience, bringing these skills together to drive meaningful customer and business outcomes. Accountable to establish design as a strategic business capability and competitive advantage through significant contributions to team strategy, deep domain knowledge, and the continuous development of innovative frameworks, practices, and patterns, driving adoption of new practices. Ensures roadmap projects are delivered with high standards on experience quality, execution, and professionalism, delivering on-time and on-budget. And contribute to a culture of creativity, accountability, discourse, and measurable key results.

This job is responsible for leading multi-disciplinary Experience Design (XD) delivery, processes and functions for end-to-end digital experiences. Key responsibilities include persuades with a vision across different stakeholders, executing without day-day direction from leaders, and developing digital experience solutions independently at scale. Job expectations include applying subject matter expertise and acumen to define and deliver solutions across multiple initiatives that meet client needs and solve business problems.

Responsibilities:

• Crafts complex world-class software solutions, deliverables or reporting within time, scope, and budget by establishing XD frameworks and practices.

• Aligns to vision and strategy throughout the end-to-end product-development lifecycle.

• Persuades during ambiguous conversations with teammates, partners, and stakeholders.

• Operates independently and pro-actively resolves issues with limited direction.

As an Experience Design (XD) III, Design Research you will:

• Lead, design, optimize and deliver useful and elegant, best-in-class digital experience research working from a multidisciplinary, holistic perspective from concept to execution and implementation.

• Apply a broad range of design research capabilities across generative and evaluative user experience research to craft complete product and experience solutions.

• Lead with vision to influence, navigate, and partner with a diverse set of project stakeholders and cross-functional teams - including product management and engineering. Build influence and partnerships with stakeholders outside of ongoing project work.

• Collaborate with product design, content design, design research, design operations, and design technology across the team.

• Independently develop and deliver advanced experience design research deliverables across discovery and delivery with a full suite of research design specialties including heuristic evaluation methods, task flows, journey maps, personas, heuristic audits, usability testing, synthesis and WCAG standards.

• Integrate data, feedback from user research, analytics, and A/B testing across the customer journey, from rapid user testing to usability studies and translate qualitative and quantitative research into clear design and experience implications and cross-functional synthesized insights that are actionable.

• Advance research operations, democratization, governance, and insight-sharing mechanisms.

• Identify high-value research opportunities and proactively influence investment priorities, while driving end-to-end research planning across multiple products, experiences, and customer journeys.

• Deliver exemplary solutions leveraging and anticipating internal and external best practices and methods including synthetic research and AI-driven research opportunities.

• Research digital experiences across conversational, AI-powered, web, mobile web, and native apps (iOS and Android).

• Lead evaluation and benchmark of existing product and service experiences, heuristics, and competitive insights to move discussions forward.

• Ability to anticipate questions, lead and facilitate discussions and model ability to shift across portfolios and programs.

• Significant contribution to team strategy, serving as a craft expert that develops scalable research frameworks, repositories, standards and knowledge management practices, leading design critique, increasing research efficiency through repeatable methods, and elevating conversations as a resource to other designers.

• Lead decisively through ambiguity and influence in collaborative settings, building and nurturing strong relationships with minimal guidance, managing time and expectations with stakeholders across the organization and XD, staying knowledgeable on project and product details.

• Proficient in standards development, enhance our design system patterns in work, respect, and contribute to best practices while also helping with innovative digital, technology and AI experiences.

• Model excellent visual, communication, and storytelling skills. Demonstrate thought leadership by challenging the status-quo, present independently and navigate questions, conceive, pitch, execute creative ideas, patterns, and standards.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of industry design experience in a role demonstrating multidisciplinary design research, expertise with integrating behavioral science, customer psychology, and decision-making theories into experience design with a portfolio showcasing your proven expertise.

• Experience researching multi-channel consumer-facing apps, AI-powered experiences, responsive web and websites including complex system, user, ecommerce, and transactional experiences.

• Expert understanding of user-centered design principles and best practices and rapid ideation processes like Lean UX, Design Sprints, and Agile.

• A seasoned track record for working with cross-functional product development and design teams to ship customer-facing digital products.

• Ability to leverage, contribute and advance research design with a design system and within brand guidelines.

• Experience utilizing qualitative, quantitative, attitudinal, behavioral, and analytics data to produce actionable insights that inform decision-making and experience design.

• Self-motivated problem solver with a strong work ethic, reliable issue resolution, and time management skills with an intense focus on achieving results.

• Experience researching AI-enabled experiences and evaluating trust, transparency, explainability, adoption, and responsible AI considerations.

• Experience leveraging AI agents, automation or assistants in shipping and production.

• Highly proficient in design and design-to-code tools such as Figma, Copilot, Github, Lovable, Cursor and Claude Code.

• Works well with others, builds and nurtures strong relationships, with proven ability to influence.

• Track record of maximizing impact, being reflective and inspiring others to do their best work.

• Has a strong interest in, and aptitude for self-learning new design and technology skills.

• Demonstrates strong listening, with excellent communication, storytelling and presentation skills.

• Recognized as a key partner by engineering and product manager peers.

• Applies legal, risk, regulatory knowledge and domain expertise to solutions and strategy.

• Adapts swiftly and positively to change, embodying curiosity, resilience, and flexibility.

Desired Qualifications:

• Financial or similar industry experience preferred.

• Bachelor's degree with corresponding product design experience.

• Knowledge of collaboration and production tools such as MCP (Model Context Protocol), JIRA and Confluence.

Skills:

• User Experience Design

• Critical Thinking

• Problem Solving

• Collaboration

• Adaptability

• Product Design and Development

• Presentation Skills

• Stakeholder Management

• Decision Making

• Research

• Project Management

• Usability Testing

• Process Management

• Agile Practices

• Written Communication

Minimum Education Requirement: High School Diploma / GED / Secondary School or equivalent

Internal employees who are currently working from home are still eligible to apply. However, if selected for the role, you may be required to work onsite in accordance with the workplace excellence policy.

The following laws or regulations restrict or prohibit the hiring of individuals with certain specified criminal history for the position: FDIC

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Shift:

1st shift (United States of America)

Hours Per Week:

40

Pay Transparency details

US - CA - San Francisco - 315 Montgomery St - 315 Montgomery (CA5704), US - MA - Boston - 100 Federal St - 100 Federal St Lp (MA5100), US - NJ - Pennington - 1500 American Blvd - Hopewell Bldg 5 (NJ2150), US - NY - New York - 114 W 47th St - 114 W 47th St - Ust (NY8114), US - WA - Seattle - 401 Union St - Rainier Square (WA1510)Pay and benefits informationPay range$166,200.00 - $186,400.00 annualized salary, offers to be determined based on experience, education and skill set.Discretionary incentive eligibleThis role is eligible to participate in the annual discretionary plan. Employees are eligible for an annual discretionary award based on their overall individual performance results and behaviors, the performance and contributions of their line of business and/or group; and the overall success of the Company.BenefitsThis role is currently benefits eligible. We provide industry-leading benefits, access to paid time off, resources and support to our employees so they can make a genuine impact and contribute to the sustainable growth of our business and the communities we serve.