Senior Product Designer at Narwhal Labs, Bristol/Remote, 4 Weeks, £Day Rate DOE

Fixed-term contract (approx. 4 weeks)

Bristol-based, with a preference for on-site; remote considered

Start date: ASAP — please only apply if you’re immediately available

Day rate: DOE

About Us:

Narwhal Labs is developing an AI platform. Customers build, deploy and monitor AI agents that handle inbound and outbound customer contact. The product is in active build toward production with a mature in-house component library and design system, and an engineering team shipping weekly.

About the role:

We’re bringing in a Senior Product Designer to support the existing design team through a period of reduced capacity. You’ll be working alongside the in-house designer where available and directly with engineering and product day to day.

This is hands-on execution, not discovery or strategy. We need a senior designer who can pick up features already in flight and produce implementation-ready work from day one.

Key Responsibilities:

Maintaining design velocity on in-progress product features.

Producing engineer-ready specs including full state coverage, responsive behaviour, interaction notes and accessibility considerations.

UX writing for in-product copy where needed, in line with the brand ToV.

Working within the existing design system. Component composition, variants and new screens assembled from the existing system are in scope and expected. Changes to underlying primitives or net-new patterns are flagged for the in-house team rather than authored.

Triaging incoming design requests from engineering and making decisive tactical calls without escalation on things clearly within the current execution path.

Must-haves:

• 5+ years designing product UI for B2B SaaS, including at least one role on a data-dense product (dashboards, tables, builders or workflow tools).
• Demonstrable design systems work: Figma variables, auto-layout, component properties, token architecture and light and dark theming.
• Strong craft on responsive layouts and complex interaction states.
• Fluent with modern component library conventions at spec level. You don’t need to write code, you do need to read component code and know what’s cheap versus expensive to build.
• Strong flow and interaction judgement. You question the flow first, not the pixels. Comfortable sketching entry points, happy path, edge cases and recovery before opening Figma.
• Track record shipping end-to-end UX on complex features. Portfolio should show the thinking, not just the surface.
• Comfort making UX calls without formal research in the loop. Pattern knowledge, prior experience and direct conversations with engineering get you to a confident call in hours not weeks.
• Ability to work independently and ship daily with minimal oversight.

Desirable:

• Experience designing for AI-native products: LLM agents, chat or conversation UI
• Accessibility literacy and keyboard and screen reader awareness.
• Comfort writing clear concise in-product copy.

How we work:

Direct, peer-to-peer. Communication is plain and low ceremony. Work is tracked in a standard ticketing system, designs live in Figma, async by default with a short daily check-in with engineering.

Clear points of contact are in place for scope and priority decisions and for day-to-day engineering coordination.

You’ll have access to the full design system, the component library, prior wireframes and a written handover covering current state, open questions and decisions already taken.

We care about how you think and how you handle ambiguity more than about specific tools or titles. Calm judgement under constraint, not portfolio polish.

No recruiters, thank you.