Lead Product Designer

At a glance

  • Location: Soho, London.

  • Hybrid: 3 days a week in the office (4 during our peak season)

  • Role type: Full-time

  • Salary: £85,000 to £95,000

About Popsa

We take more photos than ever, but most of them end up buried in camera rolls, mixed in with screenshots, receipts and where we parked the car. The moments that matter most are often the hardest to find.

Popsa turns that clutter into something worth keeping. Our memory curation platform uses on-device intelligence and generative AI to find the stories in your photo library, suggest themes, write captions and lay out designs. Then we turn them into beautiful, covetable photo books, prints and more, so anyone can make something they're proud of, no design skills needed.

And it's working. More than 13 million people across 50+ countries have used Popsa, our apps are localised into 12 languages, and most of our orders now come from outside the UK. Over 400,000 of them have left us a five-star review. Along the way, Deloitte has named us in its UK Technology Fast 50 three years running, the FT has ranked us among Europe's fastest-growing tech companies, and we've become a Certified B Corp.

We're proud of what we've built, but we think the best of Popsa is still ahead of us.

The challenge

Recently, we've been focused on curation: building tools that understand your photo library and make it fast to find, rediscover and choose the stories worth keeping. The next chapter is about levelling up how those stories are told.

We want to honour people's memories. That means helping them make something sophisticated, deeply personal and genuinely covetable.

Two problems sit at the heart of this:

  • Rethinking how our customers make designs with AI. Our current approach works, but new AI technologies give us a chance to make the process of creating a beautiful object more intuitive, and make the finished design more sophisticated. We need to rethink the design experience from the ground up to take advantage of that.

  • Raising the standard of the whole experience. We're in a crowded market, and as a consumer app, people need to choose us again and again. The experience has to be easy, empowering and lovable, every time.

The role

This is a hands-on, individual contributor role with no direct reports. You'll work closely with product, engineering and leadership to define, design, ship and iterate on new features and products.

You'll work across the whole product surface area; our native iOS and Android apps, our web app and our website, on projects that range from quick, tactical growth projects to longer-term strategic bets.

Within your first year, we'd hope you've:

  • Taken a design idea from early exploration to something live in customers' hands

  • Shipped projects with measurable positive impact on key business metrics

  • Raised the craft bar for the whole team, by contributing to our design system, an internal shared tool, or our ways of working

  • Become someone engineers love working with, because your designs are considered, clear and easy to implement

  • Earned your peers' trust, so when you push for quality, people listen

You'll be a great fit if you have

  • A portfolio that shows strong visual design skills

  • Genuine love of making the work. You're a designer first, and you want to stay close to the tools even at a senior level.

  • A track record of designing and shipping software products

  • Strong interaction and product thinking, and the confidence to make decisions in open-ended problem spaces

  • Great Figma skills

  • Curiosity about how AI tools can change the way you design

  • Clear communication, in writing and in the room

  • Comfort using quantitative and qualitative data to inform your decisions

Bonus points if you have

  • Experience designing native mobile apps, especially consumer products

  • Experience prototyping in code, or a real appetite to start

This role might not suit you if

  • You'd rather set strategy than do the hands-on work.

  • Your strength is UX or research rather than visual design. Visual craft matters here as much as the journey does.

  • You want to move into people management soon. This role has no direct reports.

  • You prefer clear briefs and a defined path. You'll often be shaping the problem as well as the solution.

Design at Popsa

  • Design is a strategic partner, not a service. Product design reports to our CEO, who has a design background and a very high bar for craft.

  • We're a lean team, so everyone has real range. The upside is ownership, and the chance to work across a large product surface area.

  • We work closely and have a bias towards working in person. Product, engineering and design are all in London. We're hybrid because we believe better work happens when we're together in the room.

  • We work quickly, and we care about craft. We're a consumer app in a crowded market, and a great experience is what sets us apart.

  • We prototype in code. Everyone on the team has shipped pull requests. We love AI tools and are always experimenting with new ways to design.

Benefits

  • 25 days' holiday plus bank holidays, rising by a day for each year you're with us (up to 28)

  • Group pension scheme (salary sacrifice)

  • Private medical insurance, including dental and optical cover

  • Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan

  • Workplace nursery salary sacrifice scheme

  • Electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme

  • Enhanced sick, parental and other leave

More on life at Popsa: popsa.com/careers

Interview process

We aim to be thorough, fast and transparent. You can expect the whole process to take no more than 4 weeks from start to finish, and we're happy to be flexible around your schedule.

  1. Intro call with our Product Design Director (45 minutes, video)

  2. Portfolio review (90 minutes, video). Everyone who reaches this stage gets real feedback.

  3. Collaborative design exercise in our Soho office (2 hours). You'll work on a hypothetical problem inspired by our product, not live work.

  4. Meet the team with colleagues from product and engineering (1 hour, ideally the same day as the exercise).

  5. Decision and offer

If there's anything we can do to make the process work better for you, from scheduling to accessibility needs, just let us know.

We're unable to sponsor visas for this role.

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