Lead Product Designer

Lead Product Designer (UX/UI & Research) London (Hybrid) | Contract | Start ASAP with potential for growth into our full time vacancy | Competitive salary The role We’re a well-funded startup building category-defining AI for architecture, engineering and construction: an archaic industry at a critical juncture. The Building Safety Act now requires firms to evidence their design decisions, and directors carry personal liability. Join Bite as our first in-house designer, initially for a 6 month contract, but with the potential to grow into our full time vacancy. Working strategically and directly with the head of product, founders and engineering team, you’ll own the entire design function and lead the transformation of our beta into a high-quality user experience that shapes the future of Bite’s AI for the built environment. Why join Bite The problem is genuinely hard. When a structural engineer changes a component in their building design model, the same component exists in drawings, schedules, specs and emails under different names, in different formats, some of which LLMs don’t understand, and with no shared identifier. Detecting these changes, predicting the downstream impacts and propagating them using AI under the engineer's supervision is the core of our product. You'll own the UX/UI for the whole product, not a slice of it. We're a small, agile, product-led team so if we need to pivot, we will prototype, test and build rapidly. You won’t find a feature factory or dependency delays here. Your work ships to people who pay. The platform beta is in production with signed customers that include some of the UK's leading structural engineering firms who are keen to build with us. With our tight feedback loops, you’ll have plenty of data to help drive your design decisions. What we're building Structural engineers work across numerous, fragmented sets of tools with no shared source of truth. When a design changes, propagating that change across files is manual, slow and error-prone, and the errors are expensive. Bite is the change management and audit trail layer for structural engineering. The platform does three things that today take weeks of manual work: natural-language search across a project's entire file ecosystem, cross-file impact detection e.g. "I changed Column C7 in the structural model - what drawings, schedules, and specs are now out of date?" and propagation of the detected changes to all affected files. What you’ll do Set the design direction for our products and raise the overall bar for craft and quality. Establish and scale our design foundations, including the design system and UI patterns. Shape the visual identity and brand across every customer touchpoint. Partner with customers to shape product vision, design strategy, and the experience roadmap. Collaborate with the head of product, founders and engineering team to define problems, explore solution spaces, validate concepts, ensure technical feasibility and ship product improvements that move the metrics that matter. Analyse product performance to identify friction points and drive iterative optimisation, aligning business goals with user-centred product opportunities. Lead comprehensive user research, including interviews, surveys, behavioural analysis, prototype testing, and usability studies, to identify user needs, confirm concepts, and produce actionable insights. Translate insights, data, and business needs into user journeys, wireframes, prototypes and ultimately end-to-end, intuitive design solutions that drive meaningful improvements. Facilitate workshops to build shared understanding and present design decisions clearly to influence strategic, experience-led discussions. Encode the judgment and complexity required for complex workflows under the hood, while keeping the user experience simple and seamless. Stay current on emerging AI trends and product patterns. Build a clear point of view on what matters, and bring that perspective into how…