Kinship
Design Engineer (UI/UX)
1y ago
Europefigma
Design Engineer (UI/UX) focused on creating intuitive and delightful user interfaces for complex professional software, emphasizing Figma documentation.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- You don't need to tick every box, but here's what would help you succeed.
- 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 have
- 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 .
Conditions
- 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.
Other
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.