Principal UX Designer in London

Bentley Systems is the infrastructure engineering software company, advancing the world's infrastructure, sustaining both the global economy and the environment. Within Bentley, the Design organization shapes meaningful experiences, from brand to in-product interactions, with clarity, coherence, and craft.

The Bentley Infrastructure Cloud (BIC) team designs the experiences that bring Bentley's cloud platform to life, connecting infrastructure data, workflows and digital twins into a coherent, powerful product ecosystem. We work across complex, interconnected product surfaces where clarity and usability are hard-won, and where great UX directly determines whether users can unlock the value of their data at scale.

As Principal UX Designer in the BIC team, you're a senior individual contributor who leads through standards, judgement and influence. You define what great UX looks like across BIC's product surfaces, hold that bar in every crit and every deliverable, and challenge us to do better when it's not being met, regardless of who's in the room.

You make this team's designers measurably better, not through management, but through the rigor of your feedback, the depth of your insight, and the way you model senior UX thinking in practice. You treat AI as a lens for rethinking what that practice looks like, and you bring the team with you. In a team built to shift how design is perceived at Bentley, you are the living proof of that case.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the UX quality standard across all team engagements, establishing what great looks like, reviewing work against it, and making sure every output reflects the level this team was built to deliver.
• Be the senior UX authority on the work itself, making the smartest calls on user flows, interaction patterns, information architecture and experience quality, and holding that position under pressure from stakeholders, timelines and competing priorities.
• Lead with evidence, grounding design decisions in deep user understanding, whether through direct research, data interpretation or synthesis of existing insight, and building that discipline into the team's rhythm.
• Build design credibility in rooms where it doesn't yet exist, walking into resistant product and engineering teams and changing the dynamic through the quality of your thinking and the confidence of your presence.
• Work upstream alongside strategic design leads, contributing to problem framing, vision work and organizational design challenges that sit well above the level of individual product delivery.
• Influence product and business decisions by demonstrating how experience quality drives adoption, retention, efficiency, customer satisfaction and other strategic outcomes.
• Model and advance AI-enabled UX practice, not just using tools, but actively exploring what AI changes about how this team researches, synthesizes, prototypes and validates, and bringing the rest of the team with you.
• Develop the designers around you through direct, rigorous feedback, pairing and critique, you raise the standard of every person you work alongside, and you do it in a way that builds capability rather than dependency.
• Build the evidence base, leading the team's case study and knowledge output so that every engagement produces proof of design's value, not just a deliverable.
• Communicate regularly with managers, peers and colleagues via Microsoft Teams and in person.

This is a full-time, individual contributor role. As part of a global team, some flexibility in working hours may be required to accommodate collaboration across time zones. Travel may be required infrequently to Bentley office locations.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years in UX, interaction or product design with a portfolio that demonstrates sustained excellence across complex, multi-product environments and a clear point of view on what great UX looks like.
• A track record of raising the design bar in organizations where design influence had to be earned, you've been in rooms where UX wasn't trusted and you changed that through craft, confidence and consistency.
• Deep expertise in user-centred design methods, from research and discovery through to detailed interaction design, with the judgement to know what depth of investigation a problem actually requires.
• Genuine design authority, you have strong opinions about quality, you can articulate them to any audience, and you don't let the standard slide under pressure from timelines or stakeholders.
• Proven ability to lead through influence without authority, you've shaped the direction of complex initiatives, developed senior designers around you, and driven cultural change in a design function.
• Deep fluency across the full UX spectrum, from upstream strategic framing and systems thinking to detailed interaction craft, and the judgement to know which the moment calls for.
• Active, confident leadership of AI in UX practice, you're not experimenting with AI, you're integrating it, and you have a clear point of view on what it changes and what it doesn't.
• Strong accessibility literacy and a commitment to inclusive design as a baseline, not an afterthought.
• Fluency in Figma and strong design system literacy.
• The kind of presence that makes a room better, calm under pressure, direct in feedback, generous with thinking, and relentless about the standard.

What we offer:

• Step into a collaborative work environment where ideas flourish, and teamwork propels us forward towards shared success.
• An attractive salary and benefits package.
• Bentley Impact Day: take a day off from work to volunteer with an organization of your choice.
• Celebrate milestone achievements and moments that matter through our colleague recognition award programs.
• A commitment to inclusion, belonging and colleague wellbeing through global initiatives and resource groups.
• Be part of a company committed to making a real difference by advancing the world’s infrastructure for better quality of life, where your contributions help build a more sustainable, connected, and resilient world.

Bentley is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers for employment all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, religion/belief, national origin, caste, age, or any other characteristic protected by local law or unrelated to job qualifications.