Senior Guest Experience Designer

Guided by our purpose, core values, and leadership principles, we are creating an airline people love. Our corporate teams set the strategies and operational plans to ensure the success of our company. Whether we use our expertise in accounting, human resources, finance, planning, legal, marketing, or any of our operational divisions, our shared passion for travel and our guests is what motivates us to achieve excellence each day. If you share our passion for creating an airline people love, we want to hear from you. 

The Senior Experience Designer is a subject matter expert in product and guest experience design at Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, bridging customer experience strategy and digital experience execution across complex guest journeys. As an individual contributor, this role exercises considerable judgment to make design decisions within assigned journeys and areas of expertise and provides recommendations addressing guest, business, operational, and technology challenges. With minimal direction from leadership, this role owns discovery, journey design, validation, and design delivery and guides partners toward intuitive, accessible, and measurable experiences across digital products, offline touchpoints, customer service operations, and the broader brand journey.

• →Act as a subject matter expert in product and guest experience design for an assigned guest journey, experience area, or set of related touchpoints, connect customer experience strategy with digital and operational execution.
• →Make recommendations to identify unmet needs, friction points, and opportunities and translate findings into clear experience requirements and concepts.   
• →Frame discovery and experience strategy across the Guest Travel Journey, using quantitative and qualitative research, product evidence, operational insight, and business priorities to frame opportunities and influence investment decisions with Product and Engineering.
• →Partner with Product, Engineering, Analytics, and business teams to shape priorities, resolve tradeoffs, and ensure the intended experience is delivered.
• →Analyze qualitative guest insights, research, operational feedback, and quantitative product data to define success measures and make recommendations that address experience gaps and business challenges within the assigned area of expertise.
• →Design high-quality and consistent journeys across native iOS, native Android, desktop and mobile web, preserving platform conventions while maintaining clear content, brand expression, accessibility, and continuity between touchpoints.
• →Ensure experiences meet accessibility, trust, brand, and design-system expectations.
• →Apply systems thinking to identify cross-journey dependencies and systemic experience gaps where digital interfaces interact with human operations or physical environments, and coordinate solutions beyond the assigned area.
• →Guide and influence Product, Engineering, Analytics, operational, and business partners through clear storytelling, visual communication, and workshop facilitation to build alignment, resolve tradeoffs, and deliver a unified experience vision; coach other designers through feedback and shared practices. 

• 4 years of experience in product design across native mobile and web products or related discipline.
• Bachelor’s degree with a focus in industrial design, marketing, business or related field, or an additional two years of relevant training/experience in lieu of this degree.
• A record of independently leading complex digital experience design: resolving ambiguity with data, demonstrating strong interaction, and visual craft and clear links between design decisions, user needs, and business priorities.
• Experience with agentic design and AI workflows, evidenced by specification engineers or agents built from, a skill or context file others used, or a case where the first generated result was wrong and what changed.
• Strong research and business judgment, with the ability to use testing and user feedback to make persuasive claims for the best design possible under existing technology or schedule constraints.
• High school diploma or equivalent.
• Minimum age of 18.
• Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

• 2 years delivering design work as working code or specifications engineering built from.
• Experience in travel, e-commerce, loyalty, payments, or other user experience spanning physical and digital spaces and multiple brands.
• Reviewing implementation contributions, deeper ability in a second platform, or work with mixed SwiftUI/UIKit, Compose/Views, or web-component environments.
• Digital extensions such as notifications, boarding passes, wallets, widgets, Live Activities, kiosks, or other self-service interfaces.
• Experience with Claude Code or an equivalent LLM coding environment, including reusable agent workflows, design-system contributions, or experiment instrumentation developed with appropriate partners.
• Experience designing e-commerce, travel or other high-scale consumer experiences.
• Experience using behavioral, operational or product-performance data to improve guest journeys.
• Communication and storytelling skills with experience in influencing business decisions, scope, or project goals.

Embody our values to own safety, do the right thing, be caring and kind, and deliver performance.

Pay will be based on multiple factors, including and not limited to location, relevant experience/level and skillset while balancing internal equity relative to other Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon employees. Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon is committed to fair, unbiased compensation along with competitive benefits in all locations in which we operate.

Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines & Horizon Air are regulated by the Department of Transportation (DOT – regulations, 49 CFR part 40) and all applicants are advised that post-offer and/or pre-employment drug testing will be conducted to determine the presence of marijuana, cocaine, opioids, phencyclidine (PCP) and amphetamines or a metabolite of these drugs prior to any offer or employment or transfer into a safety-sensitive position. Failure to submit to testing or positive indications of drug use will render the applicant ineligible for employment with Alaska Airlines/Hawaiian Airlines/Horizon Air and any employment offer will be withdrawn.