Founding designer / design lead (UX)

Smplrspace has an opening for a Design Lead to join the company as its first design employee. The role will be fundamental to the positioning of the company, both from a product and brand perspective. While strongly focused on UX aspects, the role will require wearing of many hats and leveraging on a diversified skillset. We're looking for a seasoned senior user experience designer or a design lead who's willing to get scrappy but has the ambition and potential to become a respected voice in the industry. The role would fit someone who can quickly go from being an individual contributor in a small team, to stepping into the shoes of a team lead who can structure and nurture their team's contributions.

Our product

Smplrspace is a digital floor plan platform that helps software companies add interactive 2D & 3D floor plans to their apps. We provide the tools to digitalise floor plans, furnish them, render them in-app and on-brand, and then visualise data layers on the floor plan with options to build custom user experiences. You can think of us as a developer tool for software companies supporting indoor space operations, or as a super fancy charting library. The platform is built with developers in mind and positioned to help creatives build great solutions for their users painlessly.

The job

There are 2 dimensions to this role: UX design, and leadership. On the UX side, you will be tasked to lower the level of ambiguity around the product by deploying various user research strategies to help us define what should be built, for who, and why. As a small team, prioritisation is key and this role informs backlog and product positioning decisions. You will own the cohesiveness of the experience throughout the different parts of our offering, as well as set up the product, user onboarding and content strategy to support our product-led growth goals. On the leadership side, you will define the design vision and roadmap for the team, create a hiring plan to deliver on this roadmap, structure the team across products and manage its workload. You will report directly to the founders. The role will include supporting business growth through branding, story telling, understanding sales personas, ensuring coherent visual design from marketing to product.

This is a role for a versatile individual who thrives in the early stages of building a company. We foresee the role being more focused on individual contributions in UX for the first year or so, to then evolve more and more towards being a manager and leader. We don't expect you to be 100% competent on all aspects of the job on day 1, but you should come with a growth mindset and the ability to pick things up quickly.

Skills we value for this position

• Good communication, especially in writing
• Strong empathy
• Mastery of UX fundamentals: user research, journey mapping, JTBD, personas, etc.
• Visual design and communication
• Wireframes
• Design systems
• Branding
• Story-telling
• Stakeholders management
• Team leadership
• Systems thinking
• Essentialist product design
• Understanding of developer tools
• Community building
• Interest in organisation design, culture setting

We expect career paths to develop alongside company growth. While this role is geared towards a future leadership position, we are open to personal aspirations to become an expert individual contributor instead, as long as it is in line with company needs and job performance.

Working with us

We are a small, lean and scrappy team working remote-first and (as much as we can but we're still learning) async-first. We value working in a collaborative and fun environment, but we balance that with the respect that deep work is how each of us produces our best. We operate on trust and transparency, taking ownership and responsibility, managing our own tasks and time, and delivering to the best of our abilities. We see ourselves as craftspeople and take pride in our work. We care about our culture and are excited to have it evolve with more people coming in and adding a piece of their story to it. We are hoping to and working towards providing psychological safety such that each one of us can be themselves at work, no matter our differences. We are also a very young company and there still is a lot of ambiguity in our daily work. We look forward to improving our processes in a collaborative manner as we grow. We expect to see high growth and constant change in the years ahead, but we do not abide by the hustle culture.

Notes

• We try to create a diverse and inclusive environment where leadership, contributions and creativity are not inhibited by social constructs such as race, gender, age, beliefs, (dis)abilities, etc.
• We do not evaluate seniority by the number of years in the workforce, but by the demonstrated ability to identify problems, and then conceptualise, articulate, and deliver solutions quickly.
• We do not gate-keep based on individuals having received a degree, studied a specific topic or in a specific place. We value experience above all.