Product Design/Engineer - Inside IR35 - News Publication

Design Engineer (AI Products) - National News Platform

Day rate: £650 (Inside IR35)Duration: 6 months Location: Central London (Hybrid - 2-3 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.

• 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

• 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/TypeScript 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

• Strong UX/UI and interaction design background - with a portfolio showing shipped, consumer-facing digital products
• Experience building rich, interactive UIs in React + TypeScript
• 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

• Experience with native design patterns (iOS/Android)
• Familiarity with RAG, embeddings, vector databases
• Python (for small prototyping tasks)
• Design system experience (creation or contribution)
• Experience designing media, content, or large-scale consumer platforms

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.

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Impellam Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.