Product Design Engineer
Design Engineer (AI Products) – National News Platform
Day rate: £650 (Inside IR35)
Duration: 6 months
Location: Central London (Hybrid – 3 office days)
We’re looking for a Design Engineer with strong UX/UI craft, interaction design expertise, and front‐end product-building experience to redefine the future of AI‐driven digital experiences for a major national news platform used by millions.
This is not a backend engineering role.
This is a role for someone who lives at the intersection of product design and front‐end engineering. Someone who cares deeply about user experience, visual quality, interaction detail, and how design translates into a real shipped product.
You’ll prototype new concepts in Figma, validate interactions rapidly, and bring them to life with polished, production-ready UI. You’ll collaborate with product designers, UX researchers, and engineering leads to shape AI‐powered interfaces that feel intuitive, elegant, and deeply user‐centred.
You’ll Thrive Here If You...
- Are a designer‐builder who loves crafting beautiful interfaces and then bringing them to life in code
- Obsess over interaction design, micro‐interactions, and user flow improvements
- Have strong opinions on layout, hierarchy, typography, visual polish, and motion
- Can translate complex AI capabilities into clear, human‐centred UX
- Think like a Product Designer but build like a UI Engineer
- Believe great design is measured by how it ships, not just how it looks in a file
What You’ll Do
- Design and build AI‐powered user experiences, focusing on clarity, usability, and interaction quality
- Prototype rapidly in Figma, exploring content discovery, search, summarisation, and intelligent UI behaviour
- Translate prototypes into high‐quality React interfaces
- Work hands‐on with design systems to create accessible, scalable, reusable UI components
- Collaborate with designers to test, refine, and elevate user journeys
- Bring AI capabilities (LLMs, RAG, embeddings) to life in a way that feels natural and user‐first
- Influence product direction by demonstrating what’s possible through UX‐led prototypes
Essential Requirements:
- Strong UX/UI and interaction design background — with a portfolio showing shipped, consumer-facing digital products
- Experience building rich, interactive UIs in React
- A designer’s eye for detail: spacing, motion, feedback, clarity, and hierarchy
- Ability to take an ambiguous user problem and shape it into an elegant, thoughtful experience
- Experience integrating AI/LLM features into user interfaces
- Comfortable owning a feature end‐to‐end, from concept sketches to polished UI
Your ideas could shape how millions experience the news. If you’re ready to build what’s next, please apply with an up-to-date CV to get a conversation rolling.