Principal Product Designer

About Us

Every business needs to know who they’re really working with whether it’s suppliers, investors, partners, or third parties. At Xapien, we’re reinventing how organisations do that, combining speed, scale and accuracy with cutting-edge AI.

Since 2018, we’ve grown from a deep-tech startup to a global player in AI-driven due diligence and risk intelligence. 2024 was a landmark year as we closed a $10M Series A, earned recognition in the Chartis RiskTech100® and Everest Group’s Leading 50™, and expanded our products, markets and customer base.

2025 was even bigger: With new regulations, rising compliance pressure and growing reputation risks, organisations everywhere are demanding smarter, faster ways to work and they’re turning to us. Customers worldwide from global law firms and private banks to universities and nonprofits rely on Xapien to turn days of manual research into trusted insights, delivered in minutes.

Our momentum so far

Customers in a diverse range of industries, with particular growth in wealth management, financial services and supply chain onboarding.

Demand accelerating beyond our UK headquarters, across multiple continents with new customers in the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania.

Why this is an exciting time to join

This isn’t just another job role; it’s an opportunity to shape the future of the due diligence industry with a market-leading product trusted by global organisations. Whether you’re in marketing, communications, sales, or finance, you’ll play a critical role in driving growth, building credibility, and defining how we connect our product to a rapidly evolving market.

We’re scaling fast with more customers, more releases, and bigger regulatory and market challenges. Expectations are rising, due diligence now means real-time insight, delivered efficiently and with impact. You won’t just be executing campaigns, closing deals, or managing numbers, you’ll be influencing strategy, optimising processes, and helping position a brand that’s setting the new standard for trust and transparency.

For people who love learning, innovating, and making an impact that matters now is the moment to be a part of Xapien.

As Principal Product Designer at Xapien, you'll lead the way through brand-new design challenges, building intuitive and delightful experiences for our users. The backstage of our product is genuinely complex deep tech — but our job is the opposite: to demystify AI and make it effortless for anyone to use, from a highly specialised analyst to someone doing research for the very first time.

This is the most senior individual-contributor design role in the company. You will own and advance our design strategy, set the bar for craft and user experience, and act as the design conscience of the product. You'll be an advocate across the business for great UX, and a trusted partner to Product and Engineering leadership.

A defining part of this role is designing for AI. Our users need to trust an automated system with high-stakes decisions, which means designing for explainability, evidence and provenance, calibrated confidence, and clear human-in-the-loop control. You'll shape how AI-generated findings are surfaced, sourced and acted on — turning model complexity into clarity people can rely on.

This is a rare opportunity to lead meaningful, customer-centric design innovation at a fast-growing AI company, with a real chance to shape our growth and our users' working lives.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Own and drive the design strategy to create a cohesive, engaging and visually compelling product experience that aligns with company goals and vision.
• Design for trust in AI — define the patterns that make automated findings transparent, evidenced and explainable, so users understand not just what the system concluded but why, and stay confidently in control.
• Evolve and scale our design system in step with our product vision, integrating deep craft with strategic insight to keep the experience consistent and the team fast.
• Lead the end-to-end process — map, plan, analyse, design and ship a lean, well-reasoned discovery-to-delivery process that identifies the highest-value opportunities across existing and new product areas.
• Collaborate across teams — partner with Product, Engineering and Marketing to define and champion a user-centred vision, using research and insight to guide high-impact, cross-functional initiatives.
• Elevate quality across the journeys — raise the standard of our designs and experiences end to end, and proactively advocate for strategic, high-impact design opportunities.
• Lead by example — set high standards, mentor designers, and grow design maturity and capability across the wider product organisation.
• Contribute to a positive, inclusive and productive culture where the team can thrive and do their best work.

YOUR SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

EXPERIENCE

• 8+ years in product / UX / UI design, with a portfolio showing a track record of impactful, high-quality, shipped work.
• Proven success driving complex projects from concept to execution, particularly in ambiguous or rapidly changing environments.
• Demonstrated ability to design AI-powered or data-dense products — and a genuine point of view on how to make complex, automated systems trustworthy and usable.
• Expertise building and scaling robust design systems that keep products consistent and teams efficient — designing for scale and edge cases, not just the happy path.
• Comfortable operating at both strategic and execution level: you set direction, and you're not above doing the hands-on work.
• Strong track record managing multiple high-stakes projects and partnering closely with Engineering. Design and Engineering working well together matters enormously here, so we're looking for someone who brings that enthusiasm and experience.
• In-depth familiarity with agile ways of working and modern, lean design processes.
• Preferred: experience in startup or high-growth settings, or design agencies, with a diverse perspective on design across industries.

DESIGNING FOR AI

• A clear understanding of the unique UX challenges of AI products — handling uncertainty, surfacing evidence and provenance, communicating confidence, and designing graceful failure when the model gets it wrong.
• Experience designing human–AI collaboration and agentic workflows, keeping people meaningfully in the loop on high-stakes decisions.
• Comfort building functional, code-based prototypes (not just static mockups) — using Claude Code and AI coding agents — to validate UX hypotheses in something real before committing full engineering investment, with an appetite to work directly alongside Engineering in the codebase.
• An interest in working alongside research and engineering to shape evaluation and quality, so design decisions are grounded in how the system actually behaves.

DESIGN LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

• Ability to define, drive and execute a cohesive product vision alongside Product that aligns design with broader business objectives and market positioning.
• Deep expertise in leveraging current UX thinking and emerging technology to drive product innovation and differentiation.
• Advanced proficiency across a modern design and prototyping toolchain — Figma and FigJam for design, systems and collaboration; Claude Code and other AI coding agents for building functional, code-based prototypes; plus comfort with version control (Git/GitHub) and product analytics — with a focus on optimising workflows and team productivity.
• Strong mentorship skills, fostering growth in both craft and interpersonal skills across the design team.
• A high bar for craft and accessibility — designing to WCAG standards as a matter of course, not an afterthought, for a product used in regulated, high-stakes settings.

STRATEGIC IMPACT & COLLABORATION

• Proven track record of influencing product strategy at the executive level and contributing to high-level decision-making.
• Extensive experience partnering with Product and Engineering leaders to shape vision, roadmap and prioritisation.
• Expertise in stakeholder management — skilled at building alignment and driving consensus across departments.
• Ability to translate complex user insight and commercial drivers into forward-thinking, innovative design solutions. Comfort with frameworks such as Jobs-To-Be-Done is a plus.

COMMUNICATION

• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, ensuring alignment with Product, Engineering and other cross-functional teams.
• Highly skilled at stakeholder engagement — managing expectations and facilitating strategic discussion at every level.
• A constructive, continuous-improvement approach to feedback, integrating insight to raise design quality.
• A collaborative approach with Engineering — effectively clarifying requirements and resolving intricate design challenges.

USER RESEARCH

• You treat user research as a core design input that shapes direction — not a box-ticking validation exercise.
• Advanced understanding of user research methodologies, synthesising insight into actionable strategy that drives design improvements.
• Skilled at integrating both quantitative and qualitative research to inform decisions and optimise the experience.
• Preferred: experience leading or overseeing research initiatives so that insight is foundational to design direction.

Here’s our promise to you

• We are going to work with you - to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do you your best work.
• We succeed together- you will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme.
• Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition.
• Life Insurance – let's hope nobody ever needs this!
• Unlimited holidays – yes, it really is uncapped – take the time you need, when you need it.
• Everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a £1k professional development fund per year if you want to learn new skills, even new things outside of work.
• Most importantly of all, we will work with you, to help you realise your fullest potential, always.