Design Engineer (AI Products) - National News Platform

Day rate: £650 (Inside IR35)
Duration: 6 months
Location: Central London (Hybrid - 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 backend 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