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Why we're hiring:
How you'll work:
Problem Framing & Discovery 💥
Context: You're skilled at navigating ambiguity, breaking down complex strategic problems into manageable parts, and leading design discovery to find the right user problems to solve.
Workshop Facilitation & Presentation
Context: You're comfortable leading collaborative sessions and presenting ideas with clarity, and can align a room of mixed disciplines around a direction.
Job Description
Product Designer
Department: Tech - Product
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Zinc - London
Reporting To: Thomas Moore
Compensation: £59,000 - £72,000 / year
Description
Design is core to how Zinc helps organisations build trust and transparency, and we're growing the team to match our ambitions. 💥
Why we're hiring:
- We've got more strategic work than capacity right now, and that's holding back some of our best ideas
- This is a new seat at the table, built to give someone real room to lead on discovery and execution rather than just keep the trains running ⭐️
- First up: a long-overdue rethink of the candidate experience, one of our biggest opportunities for impact
How you'll work:
- You'll work closely with Product & Engineering as genuine partners. 🤝
- At Zinc, designers don't just polish what's already been decided, you'll help define the problem, shape the solution, and see it through.
Role Summary 🕵️♂️
- You'll take ownership of strategic features and product areas end to end, the kind of work that shapes where Zinc goes next
- Expect real ambiguity, your job is to bring clarity to it, not just execute against a finished brief
- This is meaty, foundational work rather than incremental polish, so there's plenty of room to make your mark
- You'll run the full process yourself: research, discovery, prototyping, through to shipped product
- Do this well and you'll be driving outcomes that genuinely move the needle for the business
Key Responsibilities 🗝️
- Lead Strategic Design Projects: Own the end-to-end design process for key initiatives, from discovery and user research to wireframing, prototyping, and high-fidelity visual design.
- Tackle Ambiguous Problems: Break down complex, undefined problem spaces into clear, actionable design projects, creating clarity for yourself and the wider product team.
- Champion the User: Plan and conduct user research (interviews, usability testing) to gather insights, validate hypotheses, and advocate for user needs throughout development. At Zinc, research is a core design skill, not a handoff.
- Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work in a tight-knit partnership with product and engineering to define requirements, explore solutions, and deliver features that are valuable, usable, and feasible.
- Drive Key Initiatives: Take a leading design role on critical projects, including improving the candidate experience, from concept to launch.
- Deliver High-Quality Craft: Produce user flows, interactive prototypes, and pixel-perfect UI designs that communicate design intent and adhere to our evolving design system.
- Communicate Design Rationale: Clearly articulate your decisions and the "why" behind them to a variety of stakeholders, ensuring alignment and buy-in.
- Be Close to the Customer: Stay connected to customer-facing teams and real user feedback, championing user-centred thinking in how the team prioritises and decides.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise 🚀
End-to-End Product Design ⭐️
Context: You can independently manage the entire design lifecycle for a complex feature, from problem definition and research through to final UI and developer handoff.
Context: You can independently manage the entire design lifecycle for a complex feature, from problem definition and research through to final UI and developer handoff.
Problem Framing & Discovery 💥
Context: You're skilled at navigating ambiguity, breaking down complex strategic problems into manageable parts, and leading design discovery to find the right user problems to solve.
User Research & Synthesis 🌿
Context: You can plan and execute qualitative research independently and synthesise findings into actionable insights that inform product strategy and design decisions, not just feature details.
Context: You can plan and execute qualitative research independently and synthesise findings into actionable insights that inform product strategy and design decisions, not just feature details.
Interaction & Visual Design Craft 🎨
Context: You have a strong command of interaction design principles and can produce high-fidelity, visually polished mockups and prototypes in Figma or similar tools, and can articulate the rationale behind your decisions.
Context: You have a strong command of interaction design principles and can produce high-fidelity, visually polished mockups and prototypes in Figma or similar tools, and can articulate the rationale behind your decisions.
Workshop Facilitation & Presentation
Context: You're comfortable leading collaborative sessions and presenting ideas with clarity, and can align a room of mixed disciplines around a direction.
Strategic Product Thinking🌟
Context: You connect design to product strategy rather than just executing on briefs; you help shape them, asking the harder questions and spotting wider opportunities.
🚀 Preferred skills:
Context: You connect design to product strategy rather than just executing on briefs; you help shape them, asking the harder questions and spotting wider opportunities.
🚀 Preferred skills:
- Experience working in a high-growth startup environment.
- Experience designing for B2B or B2B2C SaaS applications.
- Experience contributing to or working with established design systems - knowing when to follow the pattern and when to question it.
- Comfort using quantitative and qualitative product data to inform decisions and sharpen design outcomes.
- Active curiosity about AI and emerging tools, backed by genuine experimentation rather than surface-level interest.
- A basic understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and their constraints.
💥 Experience Required:
- 3-5 years of experience in a product design or UX/UI role.
- A portfolio of work is required for consideration, demonstrating user research, problem-solving, and high-quality visual and interaction design.
- Proven track record of shipping products in a collaborative, agile environment.
🌸 Key Traits:
- High Autonomy: A self-starter who thrives on ownership, able to take a high-level goal and drive it forward with minimal oversight, proactively unblocking yourself and your team. Crucial for owning new, undefined strategic areas.
- Comfort with Ambiguity: You see a loosely defined problem as an opportunity to create clarity, and are energised by turning strategic ambiguity into a concrete plan.
- Pragmatism: You balance ambition with feasibility, knowing when to push for a perfect solution and when to make smart trade-offs to ship value iteratively.
- Empathy: You understand customers and teammates deeply, and it shows in your work and how you show up for the people around you.
- Collaborative Communicator: You excel at communicating design rationale to stakeholders from different disciplines, actively listen, and build strong partnerships with product managers and engineers.
- Curiosity: You always ask why, digging into customer needs and continuously looking for better ways to solve problems.
What we offer 🍉
Zinc offers a chance to work on a product that brings a fresh perspective on data ownership in hiring
- 24 days holiday + Bank Holidays + your birthday off 🎉
- £1200 annual benefits allowance (ThanksBen, from month 2)
- Early finish Fridays (16:00)
- Yearly company retreat abroad ✈️
- 30 days to Work from anywhere 🌍
- Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, and Adoption Leave (2 months full pay, then statutory)
- Statutory pension with NEST (3% employer, 5% employee)
- Zinc shares, issued through the EMI Scheme
- Unlimited access to MoreHappi coaching
- Company socials, quarterly team socials Free Monday lunches
- Nursery workplace benefit scheme (Yellownest)
- Option to lease an electric car through Electric Car Scheme
- Celebrated Zinc anniversaries 🥳