Product Designer and UX Researcher

Product Designer and UX researcher
Location: London
Salary: 70,000
Working pattern: On-site, based in central London

A chance to be the first research hire inside a small, senior design team at an AI work-execution platform built for the alternative investment sector. You'll own the research practice end to end and design from your own evidence — discovery and usability work through to flows, prototypes and shipped UI on a weekly release cadence. The users are investment analysts, associates and partners, so the work is data-dense, expert-facing and genuinely hard to get right. The team is small, high-ownership and in-office, with direct access to the executive leadership.

THE ROLE
Reporting to the Head of Product Design, you'll combine hands-on product design with ownership of the research practice for a platform used by some of the most time-poor, expertise-dense professionals anywhere.
• Build the evidence base that product decisions rest on, then design from it.
• Work across discovery and usability research through to flows, prototypes and shipped interfaces.
• Operate at a weekly release cadence within a small, senior, high-ownership team.
• Solve the access problem: users are hard to reach, their data is confidential, and participant access runs through client relationships.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING
The role splits across two areas — building the research practice and delivering design.
• Plan and run qualitative and quantitative studies: discovery interviews, contextual inquiry with investment teams, usability testing and instrumented behavioural analysis.
• Build the research operations backbone — participant access through client relationships, consent and data handling for confidential financial contexts, and a searchable insight repository.
• Establish lightweight, repeatable methods that fit a fast release rhythm, producing evidence in days rather than quarters.
• Turn findings into designed solutions: user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes and high-fidelity UI built on the in-house design system.
• Design and evaluate AI-assisted workflows for user trust, verification behaviour and failure-mode tolerance, contributing golden examples and failure taxonomies to AI evaluation sets.
• Partner with product and engineering from problem framing through to release, arguing for prioritised, traceable decisions where trade-offs happen.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
• 5+ years in product design and user research for software products.
• A portfolio showing both studies that changed decisions and interfaces you designed and shipped.
• Strong command of qualitative methods and a working command of quantitative analysis.
• Fluency in Figma and rapid prototyping.
• Experience designing and researching for expert or professional users — finance, legal, medical or comparable high-expertise domains.
• Excellent synthesis, visual and communication skills: work that is read, believed and acted on.
• Bachelor's degree in design, human-computer interact