Head of Accessibility Engineering & Standards

Guardian’s Accessibility Centre of Excellence is chartered to be proactive, authoritative, and forward-looking — not a late-stage audit function. This role owns enterprise digital accessibility standards and governance across all surfaces, with cross-org authority that extends beyond org boundaries. Both strategic and deeply technical, this leader influences design, engineering, and governance decisions at the point where they are made — not after they ship. As Guardian builds AI-native experiences, the standards for agentic accessibility are still being written. The person in this role will help write them.

• Own and evolve enterprise digital accessibility standards — conformance requirements, governance, and continuous improvement across web, mobile, and agentic surfaces.
• Lead the Accessibility Centre of Excellence as a governance function with real authority — release gates, conformance reviews, conditional approvals, third-party product gatekeeping, and exception governance.
• Embed accessibility into the design system at the architecture level — ensuring conformance is built into components by default, not retrofitted after the fact.
• Translate accessibility standards into clear, testable engineering requirements — focus behavior, keyboard navigation flows, assistive technology markup, error handling — that product engineers can implement without interpretation.
• Guide front-end accessibility architecture — reviewing and directing refactors of existing components, decoupling interaction patterns that block keyboard and assistive technology users.
• Set guardrails around AI usage and accessibility risk — defining standards for conversational interfaces, voice agents, and multimodal interactions where regulatory guidance is nascent.
• Build and operationalize audit programs and tooling capability that accelerate accessibility adoption across the enterprise.
• Uplift accessibility capability across product and design teams — through embedded consultation, standards documentation, and training that makes compliant implementation the path of least resistance.
• Define and track success metrics — compliance rates, audit outcomes, legal exposure reduction — reported as enterprise capability indicators to senior leadership.
• Build external visibility for Guardian’s accessibility practice — through publishing, speaking, and community engagement.

• Deep expertise in digital accessibility standards and web content guidelines — with a track record of governance and standards enforcement at enterprise scale, not just auditing.
• Proven ability to embed accessibility into component architecture and design systems — making hard calls on breaking changes and ensuring conformance is foundational, not cosmetic.
• Strong front-end accessibility architecture capability — experience reviewing and guiding component refactors, keyboard flow design, and assistive technology compatibility at the engineering level.
• Confidence operating across governance and risk — conformance reviews, conditional approvals, product assessments, and communicating accessibility in terms of business risk and legal exposure to executive audiences.
• A public presence in the accessibility community and genuine intellectual curiosity about the frontier — conversational and agentic accessibility, cognitive accessibility, and emerging regulatory frameworks.

Location

• Three days a week at a Guardian location in New York, NY, or Holmdel, NJ

Salary Range:

The salary range reflected above is a good faith estimate of base pay for the primary location of the position. The salary for this position ultimately will be determined based on the education, experience, knowledge, and abilities of the successful candidate. In addition to salary, this role may also be eligible for annual, sales, or other incentive compensation.

Our Promise

At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals.  Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards.

Inspire Well-Being

As part of Guardian’s Purpose – to inspire well-being – we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues. Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits. Benefits apply to full-time eligible employees. Interns are not eligible for most Company benefits.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Guardian is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to age, race, color, creed, religion, sex, affectional or sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, marital status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other classification protected by applicable law.

Accommodations

Guardian is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. Guardian also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified job applicants (and employees) to accommodate the individual's known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless doing so would create an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact [email protected]. Please note: this resource is for accommodation requests only. For all other inquires related to your application and careers at Guardian, refer to the Guardian Careers site.

Visa Sponsorship

Guardian is not currently or in the foreseeable future sponsoring employment visas. In order to be a successful applicant. you must be legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship.

Notice Regarding Guardian’s Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment

As part of Guardian’s job application process, Guardian may use artificial intelligence tools (“AI Tools") to automate the sorting and filtering of information provided by applicants as part of its preliminary screening. This preliminary screening may be used to help identify applicant materials and resumes relative to their indication that the applicant meets the requirements for the specific job for which they are applying, as specified in the listing posted on Guardian’s jobs website (Careers at Guardian at https://www.guardianlife.com/careers). At Guardian, we do not use AI Tools to substantially assist or replace human judgment or discretionary decision making in our hiring process. All hiring decisions will be made by Guardian colleagues.

Please be aware that if you apply for a specific position with Guardian, you will have the choice of opting out of Guardian’s use of AI Tools during the job application process. If you would like to request an alternative process that does not utilize AI Tools or would like to request a reasonable accommodation, within ten business days of your position application, you must email your request to [email protected], making sure to provide your name and job requisition identification number. Guardian will retain your applicant materials and resume and all information therefrom in accordance with Guardian’s document retention policy, a copy of which you may request via [email protected].

Additionally, at applicable times, Guardian will make public the most recent bias audit results for such AI tools, which may be found here. 

Current Guardian Colleagues: Please apply through the internal Jobs Hub in Workday.