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 Back End 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/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

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 + 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

Nice to Have

• 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.