Design Engineer - UI/UX

Take complex, data-dense professional software and make it feel effortless — and treat documenting it in Figma as part of the craft, not an afterthought.

Hey there — we’re Kinship 👋

We make software for architects and engineering teams. The work they do is genuinely complex — huge libraries of project content, mountains of data, fiddly technical detail — and most of the tools in their world are clunky and joyless. Ours aren't: our whole reason for existing is to take that complexity and make it feel clean, fast, and a pleasure to use.

That's the design challenge, and it's a great one. We're looking for a product designer who lives and breathes UI — someone who turns dense, complicated workflows into interfaces that feel clean, obvious, and quietly delightful. This isn't about making pretty pictures; it's about understanding how people actually work, shaping the right solution, and documenting it with real care. You don't need to know a thing about architecture or engineering to start — we'll bring you up to speed on what matters; what counts is that you're brilliant at making complex software feel simple.

And here's the best part: we already have a great designer (no joke). So you won't be a lone designer holding everything together — you'd be joining to help us grow the design team, raise the bar together, and shape how design works at Kinship as we scale. If you're properly fluent in Figma — the kind of person who treats a well-built component library and a clean handoff as a craft in itself — you'll feel right at home.

In this role, you will:

• Own the design of features end to end — from the problem and the flows through to pixel-perfect, developer-ready UI.

• Turn complex, data-heavy workflows into interfaces that feel simple, fast, and genuinely helpful.

• Build and evolve our design system in Figma — components, variants, tokens, and patterns that keep the product consistent as it grows.

• Document your work properly — states, edge cases, and interactions all spelled out — so building it is the easy part.

• Prototype interactions to pressure-test motion and behaviour before anyone writes code.

• Work hand in hand with our engineers, and help grow and shape the design team as we scale.

What we're looking for

You don't need to tick every box, but here's what would help you succeed.

Must-Haves

• 5+ years designing software products — real applications with structured data and rich interactions — not just websites or marketing pages — with a portfolio that shows shipped work, systems thinking, and obsessive attention to detail.

• Mastery of Figma as both a design and a documentation tool. Components, variants, auto-layout, variables/tokens, named states — and handoff that's clean, complete, and easy to build from. (If your home is Sketch instead, that's welcome too — it's the next best thing.)

• Figma files you can walk us through. We care as much about how you document and hand off as we do about the final screens — so expect to show us the inside of a file, not just the pretty frames.

• A deep eye for the details that make an interface just work: typography, spacing, hierarchy, and the unglamorous states — empty, loading, error, edge cases.

• Experience collaborating closely with engineers in a product team — clear communication, thoughtful handoff, and the patience to iterate until it's right.

Nice-to-Haves (these won't gate you)

• Comfort with Framer (or similar) for higher-fidelity interaction prototypes — to show how something should move, not to hand off.

• Comfort reading and tweaking HTML & CSS — enough to understand how your designs become real interfaces, and to nudge things in the browser when it helps. You absolutely don't need to be a coder, and we won't screen anyone out for not being one. But if you're a designer who genuinely loves dipping into code, you'll have a brilliant time here.

• Experience building or owning a design system.

How we think about design and handoff

A mockup that looks right isn't a finished design. For us, a design is done when an engineer can build it without guessing — every state, every breakpoint, every edge case accounted for.

That's why Figma is home base: it's the best tool we know for documenting design, and we lean on it properly — components, variants, auto-layout, variables, named states. (Sketch is the next best thing, if that's your world.) Tools like Framer are brilliant for what they're brilliant at — pressure-testing an interaction or showing how something should move — but a prototype is for exploring, not for handing off to the dev team.

We're looking for someone who treats documentation as part of the craft, not a chore tacked on at the end. Get that right and everything downstream — build quality, speed, the feel of the final product — gets better.

You’re probably someone who:

• Is happiest turning messy complexity into something that feels obvious.

• Sweats the details — states, spacing, edge cases — because you know they are the product.

• Likes being in the room where product decisions get made.

• Enjoys shipping quickly and often, in person, with a small, motivated team.

• Values clarity and simplicity over flashy gimmicks.

• Takes real pride in the craft, and in handing work over the way you'd want it handed to you.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary.

• A beautiful, plant-filled office in central London (by Southwark tube station) and good coffee (obviously).

• Office-first, with trust-based flexibility.

• A company that believes in work-life balance — we work hard, but go home on time.

• A no-BS team of people who love building great software together — with real autonomy and influence over the product and our culture.