User Interface Designer

Cleveland & Co (cleveland-co.com) 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. We are the hiring entity for this role. This role sits inside the Cleveland R&D team which is currently being set up. Cleveland R&D builds software ventures. Our live ventures include Reformat (reformatword.com) automatic document formatting for legal teams, and Attica (attica-co.com) time tracking, billing, and analytics for legal operations. More are in the pipeline. Cleveland & Co is itself a client, using both Reformat and Attica in its day-to-day legal work. So our ventures launch with real users, real pilots, and real commercial pressure from day one.

About the role

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. We want someone who can take rough developer centric layouts, or a half-formed idea and turn it into a beautiful, considered interface. Someone with opinions about fonts. Someone who notices when something is 2px off. Someone who can explore five versions of a UI concept before lunch and know which one is right. 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: Figma, visual systems, interface craft; and has been able to implement their own designs in code. But the way we implement work now is different. We use tools like Claude Design to generate production ready components from design systems like shadcn/ui and shadcnblocks, iterate on them live, and have workflows output to qa sites, then rapidly integrate and ship. Figma is still useful for sketching and explanation. It's just not the finished artefact anymore. You do not need to be a strong coder. You need to have touched code, understand how the web is built, and be ready to work in new ways to build and output real interfaces. This is a product role, not a ticket role. You'll be shaping new products from scratch and iterating on the ones already live. Your work ships, and your taste shows. We're a small team looking for someone who wants to roll up their sleeves and make a go of it with us. Not a contractor passing through. Someone who'll be here as the ventures grow and take real ownership of what we build.

What you'll be doing

• Designing new interfaces across our product ventures: marketing sites, SaaS dashboards, product pages, internal tooling.
• Taking a rough brief, a wireframe, or a half-formed idea, and exploring UI concepts until you find the right one.
• Working fluently with design systems like shadcn/ui and shadcnblocks, customising them so they feel like ours, not defaults.
• Using AI design tools to rapidly generate, iterate on, and refine production ready components.
• Working closely with the Engineering Lead to contribute your work as pull requests to have them integrated.
• Owning the feel of what we ship: typography, colour, motion, empty states, loading states, error states.
• Working with internal clients such as the marketing team on campaigns: landing pages, launch microsites, lead capture flows, and the visual execution behind each push.
• Contributing to branding work: product identity and the visual language of legacy sites and new ventures being developed by the R&D team.

Our stack

You do not need to be deep in all of these. You need to be fluent in Figma and ready to work in AI assisted design tooling.

Who we're looking for

You probably:

• Have a genuinely strong sense of design. This is the thing that matters most. Portfolio work, personal projects, Figma explorations, side projects. Something that demonstrates taste.
• Work fluently in Figma. You've built and shipped real interfaces, not just mockups that stayed in Figma.
• Have some coding background. You've implemented your own designs before, or you've worked closely enough with developers that you know what's cheap and what's expensive in code.
• Work fluently (or are clearly excited to work fluently) with design systems like shadcn/ui and shadcnblocks.
• 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.
• Can show us work: a portfolio, a Figma file, a shipped product, a demo video. We want to see what you make when nobody is telling you what to make.

You’ll stand out if you:

• Have a portfolio of real design work: brand identity, web design, product UI, illustration, motion. Things with your fingerprints on them.
• 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 worked in a small team before and understand the pace and scope of early‑stage product work.
• Have done branding or visual identity work.

What we offer

• Base salary £35,000–£40,000 depending on experience and portfolio strength.
• Discretionary bonus tied to company and venture performance.
• Venture participation: as new ventures spin out of the studio, early hires share in the upside.
• 4 days in‑office, Fridays from home.
• A senior team: Engineering Lead and CTO actively involving you in product decisions and working alongside you.
• Real responsibility, early. Your designs ship to production, in regulated environments, to real users.
• Bring Your Own Device (Mac) policy: you work on your own machine.

Logistics

• Start date: as soon as possible.
• Location: London office, 4 days in-person. Fridays from home.
• 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.
• Visa sponsorship: not available for this role. You must have the existing right to work in the UK.

We keep it tight. Three stages, designed to respect your time and ours:

• Intro call (30 minutes, video): A conversation with the team to understand what you're about, what you've built, and what you're looking for.
• 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.
• In‑person interview with Grant Cleveland and Dias Jakupov (1 hour): A deeper conversation at our London office covering your assessment, your portfolio, and how you'd fit into the team.

How to apply

Send us:

• Your CV.
• A link to your portfolio. This matters more than your CV. We want to see real work: 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.

A note to agencies and recruiters: please do not contact us about this role. We are hiring directly and will not engage with agency submissions, unsolicited CVs, or third‑party representation. Any CVs sent on a speculative basis will be considered the property of Cleveland & Co with no fee owed.