The role
We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer who’s ready to be the design voice on a tight, cross-functional team. Right now, this is a solo design role. You won’t be building a design org, writing process documentation, or managing other designers. You’ll be deep in the work: shaping bets, prototyping fast, shipping experiments, and closing the loop on what actually moved the needle.
Here’s where we differ from most PD roles you’ll see: we’re an AI-forward team. Our PM vibe-codes proposed solutions. Our engineers pair with coding agents. We expect our designer to lean into this too. That means you’re already comfortable reaching for Loveable, Bolt, or MagicPatterns when a quick prototype beats a static mockup. It means you’re excited about the idea of steering coding agents to ship UI tweaks yourself (we’ll help you get there if you haven’t yet). And it means you’re genuinely curious about what’s next, not just waiting for Figma to add another AI feature.
We’re open to full-time, fractional, or freelance for the right person. Our honest read is that this is a hard role to fill, so we’re casting a wide net. For fractional candidates, we think ~16 hours per week is a workable minimum. For full-time, the salary range is £80k–£100k depending on experience.
What you’ll do
The work splits across core product (making Birda the world’s best birding companion: gamification, logging, discovery) and growth (paywalls, onboarding optimisation, website CRO). You’ll move between both fluidly.
Shape and ship (most of your time, especially early on). Take well-framed bets from the team and give them form. Rapidly explore solutions, prototype, and align on an approach. Then get the design “clear enough” to unblock developers. We have zero interest in pixel-perfect Figma files or 20-page specs. The goal is to communicate intent, flag critical details, and let devs build. That said, “clear enough” doesn’t mean careless. There’s always a slightly better copy choice, a simpler layout, a more considered interaction. We want someone who feels that pull — and channels it into getting faster at the early stages so there’s time to sweat the details that actually matter.
Close the loop (growing over time). Run evaluative research like usability tests. Review A/B test results and experiment data. Use what you find to iterate on shipped work and inform what comes next. You’re not just designing; you’re measuring whether your design actually worked.
Discover (eventually). Generative research and opportunity discovery. Looking for new problems worth solving. Building a deeper understanding of our users and their motivations.
Wear whatever hat’s needed. This is a small team where everyone does a bit of everything. That might mean writing copy for a push notification, QA-ing the weekly app release, building a paywall in RevenueCat’s UI, or designing and sending a user email. If it needs doing and you can do it, you do it.
Start committing code with agents. This is where the role is heading: when you spot a UI detail that needs tweaking, you steer a coding agent to implement, test, and submit a fix for engineering review. If you’re already doing this, amazing. If not, that’s OK. The rest of the team is already working this way, and we’ll help you get there. What matters is that you see this as an exciting direction, not a threat.
Who you are
A consumer app designer, primarily. You’ve spent real years designing mobile apps as the core product, not occasionally helping out on an app while mostly working on web. Your experience is at startups or scaleups, not enterprise. You know the difference between designing for retention and designing for a brief.
Comfortable across the full spectrum, with a strong eye for craft. Research, UX, UI, visual polish, experimentation. You can go from a messy whiteboard session to a beautifully considered interaction detail and you know when each is appropriate. You’re the kind of person who’s constantly exploring other products, saving references, noticing the small details that elevate something from good to genuinely great. You’d happily spend all night polishing something to make it perfect. But you also know that’s rarely the right call, and you don’t need someone to tell you when to stop.
Impact-oriented, not output-oriented. You hypothesise before you design. You A/B test. You’re genuinely curious about what the data tells you, even when it disagrees with your instinct. “I think this looks nice” isn’t a useful contribution to a team discussion. You can explain why a direction makes sense.
An AI optimist and explorer. You’re actively curious about how AI tools can make you faster and more impactful. You see AI as the thing that buys you back time to obsess over the craft details that really matter, not as a shortcut that replaces taste. You have opinions on when to reach for a quick AI prototype vs. when to open Figma and really polish, and you make those choices based on what brings impact to the business. If you’re sceptical about AI in design or think the boundary of “AI tools” is whatever Figma ships, this isn’t the right fit.
Not afraid of code. You don’t need to be a developer, but you understand layout, CSS, and how the things you design actually get built. You’ve probably hacked together a portfolio site, maybe vibe-coded something for fun. Some teams call this a “design engineer” sensibility. At minimum, code doesn’t intimidate you, and at best, you reach for it when it’s the fastest path to an answer.
A systems thinker and a good storyteller. You reason about problems and solutions in a way others can follow. You can take a complex product challenge and explain your approach clearly to PMs, engineers, and stakeholders.
Who you’re not
A Figma jockey. If your job is moving pixels around a screen, you’ll be frustrated here. Design at Birda is about solving problems and shipping outcomes, not producing artefacts.
AI-sceptical. That’s a perfectly valid opinion to hold, but you won’t enjoy working on a team that’s actively building AI into every part of how they operate.
Purely a “UX/UI designer.” If you think in terms of wireframes and visual polish and don’t naturally extend into research, experimentation, copy, and the messy reality of growth work, this role will feel uncomfortable.
Why you’ll love it here
Real impact from day one. You’re the design voice on a small team building a product used by hundreds of thousands of people across 100+ countries. The things you ship will be in users’ hands within days, not quarters.
Work that matters. Birda’s mission is to get people outside and connected with the natural world. We believe that if you connect, you protect. You’ll be building something that genuinely makes people happier, healthier, and more conscious of the world around them.
A team that actually works like a team. Our PM can vibe-code a solution. Our designers read experiment data. Our engineers have design opinions. Everyone contributes across the full picture.
Freedom to shape the role. As the only designer, you’ll define how design works at Birda. The tools, the processes, the standards. This is a role for someone who wants autonomy and depth, not hierarchy.
What we give in return
Salary: £80k–£100k for full-time (pro-rata for fractional).
Stock options: Employee-friendly stock options grant, because you should share in what we’re building.
Remote-first: Work from anywhere within CET ±1. We collaborate in person roughly every 6 weeks in London (1-2 days).
Flexible working: We care about output, not hours. Make the school run, walk the dog whilst tracking a rare kingfisher, whatever works for you.
Co-working support: Need a change of scenery? We’ll cover co-working space costs.
The good stuff: 25 days holiday + bank holidays + your birthday off. A laptop that suits your role. And some genuinely good Birda swag.
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