Cross-Functional Collaboration & Engineering Alignment

This evaluation area focuses heavily on how you work with adjacent disciplines, particularly engineering. Because Viasat products are built on highly complex infrastructure, designers must work closely with developers to understand what is technically feasible and ensure design integrity is maintained during implementation.

Be ready to go over:

• Developer Hand-off – How you document your designs, communicate edge cases, and collaborate during the implementation phase.
• Handling Constraints – Discussing times when you had to scale back a design due to technical limitations or tight deadlines.
• Influencing Engineering Culture – How you build relationships with developers and help them understand the value of user experience.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Conducting collaborative design sprints with engineering teams, and speaking basic technical vocabulary (such as APIs, latency, or front-end frameworks) to build credibility.

Example scenarios:

• Describing a situation where an engineer told you a critical UI interaction was impossible to build, and how you collaborated to find an elegant alternative.
• Explaining how you managed conflicting feedback from a Product Manager and a Lead Systems Engineer during a design review.

User-Centered Problem Solving in Complex Systems

This area assesses your strategic thinking and user research methodologies. Interviewers want to see how you approach unstructured, ambiguous problems and translate them into logical, user-friendly solutions.

Be ready to go over:

• Research Methodologies – How you choose the right research methods (such as user interviews, usability testing, or heuristic evaluations) for your project.
• Data-Informed Design – Utilizing quantitative data and qualitative feedback to validate your design decisions.
• Information Architecture – Organizing complex, multi-layered information systems so they are easy for users to navigate.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Conducting remote research with highly specialized user groups (like aviation pilots or network operations engineers) and designing for multi-device ecosystem workflows.

Example scenarios:

• Walking through how you redesigned a legacy system with high user error rates, highlighting the research-backed changes that improved task completion times.
• Explaining how you mapped out a complex, multi-step user onboarding flow for a highly technical enterprise application.

As a UX/UI Designer at Viasat, your day-to-day work will be highly collaborative and intellectually stimulating. You will be embedded within a product team, working alongside product managers, software engineers, systems engineers, and fellow designers to bring complex technology to life.

• End-to-End Design Execution – You will own the entire design lifecycle for your product area, from initial user research and wireframing to high-fidelity UI design, prototyping, and developer handoff.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – You will work daily with engineering and product management to define requirements, negotiate technical constraints, and ensure that the final implemented product matches your design specifications.
• User Research & Validation – You will design and conduct user research sessions, synthesize feedback, and use data to iterate on your designs and validate product decisions.
• Design System Advocacy – You will contribute to and leverage Viasat's internal design systems, ensuring visual and functional consistency across different products and platforms.
• UX Evangelism – You will actively champion user-centered design principles within your product team and the broader organization, helping to build a highly collaborative, design-conscious culture.

To be competitive for a UX/UI Designer position at Viasat, you must demonstrate a strong balance of technical design skills, strategic thinking, and collaborative capabilities.

• Must-have skills

  • A strong online portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design case studies, clean visual design, and experience solving complex interaction design problems.
  • Proficiency with industry-standard design and prototyping tools, particularly Figma.
  • Demonstrated experience collaborating closely with front-end developers and software engineering teams.
  • Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate design decisions clearly to cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Solid understanding of user research methodologies and usability testing practices.

• Nice-to-have skills

  • Experience designing complex enterprise software, data-heavy dashboards, or B2B applications.
  • Basic understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to better facilitate developer collaboration.
  • Experience working in highly regulated or deeply technical domains, such as aerospace, telecommunications, or defense.
  • Experience contributing to or managing shared design systems and UI component libraries.

Q: How technical do I need to be to design at Viasat? A: While you do not need to write code, you must be comfortable working with highly technical concepts. You will be designing for complex systems, so having a strong curiosity about how technology works and the ability to understand technical constraints is crucial for your success.

Q: What is the company culture like for designers? A: Viasat is historically an engineering-led company, which means design is still an evolving discipline in some business units. This environment is ideal for proactive designers who enjoy advocating for UX best practices, educating cross-functional partners, and helping shape a growing design culture.

Q: What is the typical timeline for the hiring process? A: The interview timeline can vary. While some candidates complete the loop in a few weeks, others have experienced longer processes depending on the team's location and current hiring priorities. Staying in close contact with your recruiter is the best way to manage this timeline.

Q: How should I structure my portfolio presentation? A: Focus on depth over breadth. Choose two or three projects that showcase your ability to solve complex, ambiguous problems. Be sure to highlight your process, your collaboration with engineering, your iterations, and the final impact of your designs, rather than just showing polished screens.

• Speak the language of your partners: When presenting your designs, frame your decisions not just in terms of aesthetics, but in terms of user value, technical feasibility, and business impact. This builds immediate trust with engineering and product stakeholders.
• Emphasize your collaboration stories: Prepare specific examples of how you successfully navigated disagreements with developers or product managers. Highlight how you reached a compromise without losing sight of user needs.

• Showcase systems thinking: Viasat's products are highly interconnected. Demonstrate that you don't just design isolated screens, but think about how your designs fit into the broader product ecosystem and affect the overall user experience.
• Be proactive with communication: If you don't hear back from your recruiter within the promised timeframe, don't hesitate to reach out politely. Maintaining active, professional communication helps keep your application moving forward.

Securing a UX/UI Designer role at Viasat is an exciting opportunity to work on complex, high-impact challenges that connect people around the globe. By preparing to showcase your systems thinking, your cross-functional collaboration strategies, and your ability to advocate for user-centered design in an engineering-focused environment, you can set yourself apart as a highly competitive candidate.

As you finalize your preparation, focus on refining your portfolio presentation to tell compelling stories of problem-solving and collaboration. Practice articulating the rationale behind your design decisions, and prepare to demonstrate the resilience and adaptability needed to thrive in a large, dynamic technology company.

To gain deeper insights, review more real-world interview experiences, and access additional preparation resources tailored to design roles, explore the community-sourced intelligence available on Dataford. With focused preparation and a clear understanding of what Viasat values, you are well-positioned to succeed in your upcoming interviews.

The compensation data shown above represents typical salary ranges for design professionals in this space. When evaluating an offer or discussing salary expectations, keep in mind that your overall compensation package may also include performance bonuses, equity opportunities, and comprehensive benefits. Use this data to benchmark your target compensation based on your experience level and geographic location.