Founding Product Designer in London

At Adclear, we're building the trust layer for how the world's most regulated companies bring products to market. Every bank, lender and investment platform runs into the same invisible pain: compliance review that slows down every campaign, every launch, every idea. We're turning the function that has always said 'no' into infrastructure that says 'yes, and here's how'. This is a fundamental shift in how regulated industries and compliance teams operate, and we're only at the beginning. The product you'll design is what people actually touch when they experience that shift.

Founded in 2024, we've already earned the trust of leading innovators as well as established enterprises including Monzo, Lloyds, PensionBee, Kraken, Coinbase and many others. Our early traction let us raise 2.6m in funding, and we're now scaling fast. We're building the product engine that turns a genuinely novel category into something people love to use, and this is where you come in.

The Basics

• Location: London (4 days a week in our Farringdon office)
• Pay: Competitive with meaningful equity
• Experience: 3+ years in product design, with some of it at an early-stage startup
• Reports to: founders, working day to day alongside our CTO

The Role

You'd be the first designer at Adclear. That means the product's look, feel and flow are yours to mold, and the design function is yours to build from the ground up. You won't be handed tidy specs and asked to make them pretty. You'll sit in the messy middle: talking to compliance teams and marketers at banks and fintechs, working out what they actually need, and turning genuinely hard, ambiguous problems into a product that feels obvious once it exists.

This is a design role with a real product management edge. You'll work in tandem with our CTO to shape what we build and why, not just how it looks. You'll help set priorities, scope releases and make the calls that move the roadmap. If you've been itching to own the product lens and not just the pixels, this is that role.

You'll also do your own research. We'll put you in front of customers rather than behind a survey tool: on calls, in workshops, watching how compliance reviews actually happen today. What you learn drives what we build next.

A lot of what makes this job interesting sits at the boundary between the user and the AI. When should the product act on its own, and when should it stop and ask? How much of the model's reasoning do we surface, and in what form, so a compliance officer can actually trust a decision rather than just accept it? These aren't questions with an established playbook. You'll be figuring out, from scratch, what a good working relationship between a person and an AI looks like in a high-stakes, regulated context.

What you'll do

• Own the end-to-end product experience: from problem definition and research through to interaction design, high-fidelity UI and shipped product
• Work directly with our CTO to shape the roadmap, scope releases and decide what's worth building, wearing a product manager hat alongside your design one
• Run your own research: get on customer calls, sit in on compliance reviews, and turn what you hear into clear product direction
• Establish the foundations of design at Adclear: the design system, the patterns, the craft bar and the way design works with engineering and go-to-market
• Prototype quickly to settle debates, moving from sketch to something real in a day rather than a fortnight
• Partner with engineering from design through implementation, staying close as things get built so the shipped product matches the intent
• Make complex, regulated workflows feel genuinely simple for the people who have to live in them

What the first year looks like

In your first 0 to 3 months

• You've got deep in the product, the codebase context and the problem space, and you understand who our users are and what makes compliance review painful
• You've been on real customer calls and run your own research sessions, and you're bringing insights back that change what we build
• You've shipped your first improvements and started to raise the craft bar across the product surface
• You've built a working partnership with our CTO and engineering, and you're already influencing what makes the roadmap

By 3 months and beyond

• You own the product experience end to end and are trusted to make the call on both design and, increasingly, product direction
• You've established the design foundations: a system, patterns and a clear point of view that others build on
• Your research cadence is a normal part of how the company works, not a one-off, and it visibly shapes the roadmap
• You're setting the standard for what good looks like at Adclear and laying the groundwork for the design team that comes after you

What you should have

• 3-5 years designing complex software that real people use daily under pressure
• You've shipped code, understand how systems work under the hood, and don't need engineering to explain why something is hard
• Prototypes in code as a default, not a last resort - You are a Figma expert and Cursor, Claude Code, or similar are already part of how you work

What we hope you have

These aren't hard requirements. They're the things that would make you dangerous in this role.

• Exposure to fintech, regtech or another regulated space. A real plus, but not a must.
• Comfort in ambiguity and zero-to-one. You've shipped before the problem was well defined, when there was no design system, no clear spec and no playbook to copy.
• Experience designing for non-technical operators. You've built for people who use software to get a job done, like compliance reviewers and marketers, not power users who live in the tool.
• Fluency moving between fidelities fast. Napkin sketch to clickable prototype in a day, because the fastest way to settle a debate is to make the thing real.

How we work

• Founders and the CTO are closely involved in the day-to-day, and design has a real seat at the table
• Design drives product direction here; it doesn't decorate decisions made elsewhere
• The pace is fast and the approach is still being built, and you're one of the people building it
• This isn't the right role if you want a fixed formula and a full team handed to you on day one

Benefits

• Meaningful equity as our founding designer
• Private healthcare and dental
• Hardware and software budget so you have the tools you want
• Monthly gym contribution
• A rare chance to define the product and the design function of a fast-growing company from scratch