We’re looking for a hands-on Lead Product Designer to take ownership of user experience and interaction design across our flagship CollectiveOS platform and enterprise products like Collective Lessons—a tool reshaping how Defence and Government organisations capture and act on lessons learned.
This is a high-impact role reporting directly into our Head of Product and Design, focused on setting design strategy, delivering exceptional user experience, and shaping how our products help solve real-world problems. Hands on and customer facing, you will own our Springboard design system, shape our design direction and define our team’s works - choosing the best of next gen AI-tooling to supercharge our design processes.
Highly collaborative, you’ll join a close-knit, cross-functional team of engineers, designers, and researchers who work together to build AI-powered applications for critical industries.
Design Ownership & Execution
Lead the user experience and interface design across our platform and applications
Own the end-to-end design process—from early discovery and flows to final UI, prototypes, handoff and iteration
Create clear, user-centred design artefacts including wireframes, flows, journey maps, and interactive prototypes
Run design validations (internal and user-facing) and respond to feedback with a practical, iterative approach
Balance hands-on delivery with influencing how we make product decisions
Design Practice & Systems
Shape and maintain internal design standards, workflow processes and shared libraries
Collaborate with engineers to build and evolve a consistent design system - an atomic design approach to create the foundational components for the CollectiveOS platform
Evaluate tooling and approaches that improve velocity, quality and collaboration with product/engineering
Lead on file structure, documentation and process hygiene to ensure design remains a scalable discipline
Take a systems approach to design foundational capability empowering our Customer Success Engineers to rapidly create UI and workflows against new customer problems at speed.
Collaboration & Stakeholder Influence
Work closely with product, researchers, customer success engineers and developers to deliver usable, valuable, feasible solutions
Run workshops and partner with discovery researchers to facilitate user research and understand the why
Support early product framing by translating research, technical insight, and feedback into clear design direction
Present design decisions clearly to internal stakeholders—both technical and non-technical
Provide team leadership, design mentorship and peer review for other designers, supporting a healthy and high-quality design culture
Be willing to travel to customer sites if required, a few times per year.
5+ years of hands-on product design experience, ideally including enterprise or B2B environments
Evidence of designing and shipping real, complex digital products used in production
Comfortable moving across multiple fidelity levels—from conceptual design and structure to detailed UI
Deep skills in modern design tools (Figma) and prototyping practices, but with an eagerness and adaptability to identify and use next-gen tooling.
Experience working in/with agile teams where you share ownership over product scope and delivery
A pragmatic mindset—you bias toward good-enough solutions without compromising user outcomes
Strong design communication and stakeholder engagement skills
Experience working in or around regulated industries, Defence, Government, or complex platforms is a plus
Due to UK Government and Defence customers, it is preferable that applications are willing and eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC), or hold active SC.
Work on impactful, cutting-edge products powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Be part of an agile, close-knit team that values creativity, quality, and continuous learning.
Influence to shape and lead design across our CollectiveOS platform and our suite of products and applications.
A flexible working environment, with typically 2 days of hybrid working in our Belfast office, and one of the best work-life balances you’ll find:
- A 4-day week during the holidays - July, August and December
- Early finish every working Friday at 3pm
- 25 days of annual leave, plus all NI bank holidays
A salary up to £80,000 – depending on experience.
If you're a designer who loves solving complex problems through thoughtful, validated, hands-on design—and you're ready to lead by doing—drop us a line.
Email your CV, a short introduction and anything else that might be relevant to russell@white.space
Whitespace is committed to creating an inclusive, supportive environment for all team members—we welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds and experiences.
