Brand and UI Designer in London

About us: Cleveland & Co is an award-winning outsourced in-house legal firm serving 20% of the top 20 UK asset managers, with clients whose combined assets under management exceed £8.7 trillion. Cleveland R&D builds software ventures. Our live ventures include Reformat, automatic document formatting for legal teams, and Attica, time tracking, billing, and analytics for legal operations. Cleveland & Co is itself a client, using both Reformat and Attica in its day-to-day legal work.

We're hiring a UI Designer to join our small, senior team. You'll report to the Engineering Lead, work alongside the CTO, and own the look, feel, and interaction of every product and page we ship.

The skill we're hiring for is a good sense of design. Your background is Figma, and enough coding skill to implement them pretty well. The right person for this role has cut their teeth in classic UI design:

• Working fluently with design systems like shadcn/ui and shadcnblocks.
• Using AI design tools to rapidly generate, iterate on, and refine production ready components.
• Owning the feel of what we ship.
• Contributing to branding work, product identity, and the visual language of legacy sites and new ventures being developed by the R&D team.

You need to be fluent in Figma and ready to work in AI assisted design tooling. Have a genuinely strong sense of design. Portfolio work, personal projects, Figma explorations, side projects. You've built and shipped real interfaces, not just mockups that stayed in Figma. Have some coding background. Use AI tools heavily and have views on which ones are actually good for design work in the context of teams looking to move fast. Have ~1 year of real UI design experience. An internship, placement year, a side project people actually use, or your first design job. We'll also consider candidates who are pre-graduation with an exceptional portfolio.

A portfolio, a Figma file, a shipped product, a demo video. Have a portfolio of real design work: brand identity, web design, product UI, illustration, motion. Have shipped a side project where the visual execution is the point. Know your way around accessibility, responsive design, and designing for actual users. Have done branding or visual identity work.

Base salary £35,000–£40,000 depending on experience and portfolio strength. Discretionary bonus tied to company and venture performance. This is the “excellent incentive structure” part: we're a build-to-buy studio, and we structure comp so that people who help build the ventures benefit when acquisition triggers are hit. 4 days in-office, Fridays from home. Engineering Lead and CTO actively involving you in product decisions and working alongside you. Your designs ship to production, in regulated environments, to real users. 25 days holiday plus bank holidays. Bring Your Own Device (Mac) policy. You work on your own machine.

Start date: as soon as possible. Location: London office, 4 days in-person. Part-time: we'll consider part-time arrangements for candidates still studying. We do not pay day rates, retain consultancies, or engage freelancers. Please do not apply if you are an agency or day rate contractor.

Intro call (30 minutes, video). Design assessment. We give you a scoped design task to complete in your own time. We care about your sense of design, your attention to detail, how you make design decisions, and how you communicate them. A deeper conversation at our London office covering your assessment, your portfolio, and how you'd fit into the team.

Figma files, shipped products, side projects, brand work, whatever represents you best. A short note, three paragraphs max, telling us what you're working on right now, what you find beautiful in software, and why us.