Senior UX Design Engineer

Orbital is the AI platform for real estate legal work.

Real estate shapes the world around us: our homes, our workplaces and our cultural landmarks. It’s the infrastructure that powers everyday life and is the world's largest asset class. Yet behind every single deal, real estate and legal teams work hard to navigate decades-old complexity; manually connecting documents, hidden obligations, geo-spatial context, and multiple parties into a path forward. We connect the legal and physical record, so that path is clearer than ever before. Our mission is to make real estate transactions faster, clearer, and less manual.

Here, you'll be part of changing how the deals behind the largest asset class get transacted, and will help shape the future of real estate.

A bit about us:

🚀 We’re building at the forefront of AI technology, without losing the deeply human expertise our clients depend on.

🏢 Orbital is built with former practising real estate lawyers and 250+ years of combined legal expertise. We're purpose-built for the complexity of real estate: accelerating due diligence, drafting and negotiation, and deal coordination with legal-grade precision.

💰 We've just raised a $60m Series B, led by Brighton Park Capital, to accelerate our global expansion – $75m raised to date.

🤝 We're trusted by 5,000+ real estate professionals, spanning UK Magic Circle and US Am Law 100 firms, to household names like M&S. Leading firms like BCLP, Orrick, Goodwin, Womble Bond Dickinson and Clifford Chance rely on Orbital to remove the busywork, freeing legal and real estate teams to focus on sharp judgment, standout client service, and closing deals faster.

💡 Working at Orbital means joining a bold, ambitious team, with the trust to take ownership and make a real impact from day one.

Role Overview 🔎

As a Senior UX Design Engineer, you'll own some of the hardest problems in our product and see them through until they're solved. You'll join our design team, three designers today and growing, and work inside our teams alongside product managers and our product, legal and AI engineers (our legal engineers are former real estate lawyers).

We've built a product that real estate lawyers rely on, and now we're also building for the businesses that own, occupy and develop property. You'll work across both, and much of it is new ground. Nobody here has the full answer yet, and that's the job: you'll get to know the people we build for, work out what they need from us, and build it.

This role is not about polishing screens. Our product is live and trusted by some of the most demanding real estate lawyers and property teams in the world. The hardest design problems here are not about how it looks. They are about whether people can trust it and get their work done.

Your starting point is the users, their work and the product: you notice what isn't working, decide what matters most, and see it through, from the first customer conversation to the version they use.

Here, designers build what they design. With AI coding tools, you'll build your designs into the product yourself, often live for customers the next day. When anyone can build, judgement matters most, and that is the heart of this role.

What You'll Be Doing

• Find out who you're building for: talk to customers and map who does what inside law firms and property businesses. You'll do it together with the wider team.

• Design how people work with our AI agents, which do real work on their behalf: what people hand over, how they check it and see where each answer came from, when they step in, what the agent asks about first and what it simply does, and how that shifts as AI improves.

• Solve first, then refine: get to the right answer with rough, working versions in front of real people, and add polish once the problem is solved.

• Build and ship interface changes yourself, using AI coding tools in our codebase. Engineering depth is welcome, not required.

• Keep the product coherent while everyone builds: engineers, legal engineers, product people and coding agents all build interfaces here. Explain why one option beats another so people can make the call themselves, write it down as clear, reusable rules in the codebase for agents to follow, and evolve our design system so it all still feels like one product.

New to design engineering? 🌱

Design engineering is still a new kind of role, and most great candidates won't have had the title. If you're a strong designer with a good sense of product, and you're excited about building what you design, we'd love to hear from you. We'll help you make the shift.

You should apply if: ✍️

• You go after the hard problem, not the surface one, and own it until it's solved. You judge your work by whether people use it, rely on it and come back.

• You're comfortable not knowing yet. You form a view, test it with real people, and change it when they tell you something different.

• You bring design excellence and strong product sense: hierarchy, layout, type, copy, states, navigation and flow, and a clear view of what is worth building.

• You've designed for experts, people who know their field better than any designer will. You reach for patterns they already know, and never talk down to them.

• You can say why. You make a call and ship it without waiting for sign-off, explain it in words others can reuse, and change your mind for a good reason. You'd rather guide people than overrule them.

• You're genuinely excited about AI: what it can do, where it's heading and how to get the most out of it. You already design or build with AI tools, at work or in your own projects, and you want to help shape how AI changes the working day of property professionals.

• You want to learn how property and legal work gets done. No legal or property knowledge needed.

• You have owned and shipped product design work, and can walk us through the problem, not just the result.
  

Desirable

• Experience designing AI products: showing the reasoning behind an answer, signalling confidence, and letting people steer an agent.

• Experience in legal tech, fintech, compliance or another field where precision and professional accountability shape every decision.

• Side projects, hackathons or things you've built outside work.

• Design systems and accessibility experience.

• Experience at an early-stage or fast-scaling startup, where there was no established process and you helped create one.

Reasons we might not be for you

• The pace is fast and our ways of working keep evolving. If you prefer clear boundaries between design and engineering, this may not be the role for you.

• You'll spend most of your time on hard, unsolved problems and on building, not on perfecting polished mock-ups.

Why you'll love it here

• You'll join a collaborative, highly ambitious team where the standard is high and the ownership is real.

• You'll help shape how design works in a company where AI builds alongside people.

• Your work is used by lawyers and property teams on real deals and real buildings.

How we hire

1. A short call with our recruiter.

2. A 30-minute video call with the hiring manager.

3. A design task.

4. A 90-minute panel: you'll walk us through your task, then meet people from across the company.

5. A final conversation with our CTO.

Read more

• How we think about design engineering: Design After the Leap

• Everyone Ships Code Now

• Our Product Engineering Guide

Benefits 🌟

• 💰 Competitive salary

• 🏢 Equity options in a fast-growing startup

• 🌴 25 days holiday plus bank holidays

• 📚 £1,000 personal development budget and learning opportunities

• 🏥 Company pension, healthcare, eye care and enhanced parental leave

• 🍔 Free lunch on Wednesdays, and a Deliveroo budget for late nights

• 🚲 Cycle-to-work scheme

• 🎉 Regular team off-sites, shared lunches and social events

• 🧑‍💻 We believe in flexibility, but we're big on working together in person. This role is based in our London office, several days a week.

🔒 Security is everyone’s responsibility at Orbital. We ask all team members to follow our security policies, complete regular awareness training, and handle sensitive data with care in line with ISO 27001 standards. Spot something unusual? Reporting risks or incidents quickly helps us maintain the strong culture of security and compliance we all depend on.

💡 At Orbital, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We especially welcome applications from people who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, or if the right role isn’t listed yet, we’d still love to hear from you.

💰 This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on several factors, which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and business requirements.

Everyone who works with Orbital goes through background screening before they start. It's part of how we keep Orbital secure, for the people who work here and for the client information we're trusted with.