Lead UX/UI Designer (Fixed Term Contract)

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets. Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond.

We’re looking for a Lead UX/UI Designer to shape world‑class user experiences across multiple delivery channels. This senior individual contributor role owns complex, cross‑functional design initiatives and sets the bar for visual craft, interaction design, and evidence‑based decision‑making. You will own the CX roadmap based on customer feedback distilled by user research. You’ll partner closely with product managers, engineers, data teams and stakeholders across the business, helping drive both immediate improvements and long‑term strategic UX evolution.

What you’ll do

• Design Leadership & Strategy
  • Lead end‑to‑end design for complex product initiatives—from discovery to delivery—spanning multiple channels and customer segments.
  • Translate ambiguous problem spaces into clear hypotheses, design directions and high‑impact solutions.
  • Champion evidence‑based design, shaping research questions, success metrics, and measurement plans.
• Design Delivery
  • Produce user flows, information architecture, wireframes, high‑fidelity UI and interactive prototypes using Figma at an expert level.
  • Facilitate complex stakeholder alignment with clear rationale, storytelling, and structured communication (workshops, Looms, walkthroughs).
  • Ensure your work meets the highest standards of craft, accessibility, and usability.
  • Provide informal leadership, direction and feedback to junior/mid designers—uplifting quality, consistency, and design maturity.
  • Conduct design critiques, share best practices, and coach others on systems thinking and UX fundamentals.
  • Partner with PMs, engineers and data analysts to define success events and measurable UX outcomes.
  • Use analytics tools (Heap or similar) to validate assumptions and inform iteration.
• Design System & UI Standards
  • Extend and refine our design system with scalable, accessible components, tokens and patterns.
  • Create documentation that ensures clarity and consistency across teams.
  • Identify opportunities for convergence across products to improve coherence and efficiency.
  • Partner with researchers or independently run lean testing, including usability studies, concept validation, and rapid experiments.
  • Translate insights into actionable design decisions and iterate based on feedback.
  • Work closely with engineering throughout the build process, providing support, spec clarity, and QA collaboration to maintain design integrity.
  • Maintain organised, well‑structured Figma files with clear naming, notes and versioning hygiene.

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully. If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and has a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

What you’ll need

• 7+ years experience in product-focused UX/UI, with a portfolio demonstrating end‑to‑end work on complex, data‑rich, or B2B/SaaS applications.
• Demonstrated ability to lead design work independently and influence product direction.
• Expert-level Figma capability: components, variants, tokens, auto-layout, prototyping, and design systems.
• Strong interaction design skills and impeccable visual design craft.
• Experience designing for multi‑device experiences and responsive layouts.
• Familiarity with analytics, experimentation, and metrics-driven iteration.
• Superb communication, facilitation, and stakeholder‑management skills.
• Ability to act as a mentor and thought partner to less experienced designers.
• Pragmatic, outcome‑focused, and comfortable navigating large or ambiguous problem spaces.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of HTML/CSS.
• Experience with dashboards, financial data, or information-heavy interfaces.
• Experience in Agile environments (Jira, FigJam workshops).
• Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG).

Success looks like

• Clear improvements in user task completion, adoption, engagement or retention driven by your design work.
• Strong alignment and clarity across product teams, with design strategy playing a key part in decision‑making.
• A more mature, scalable, and well‑documented design system.
• Improved design standards and quality across the team, supported by your guidance.

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values. Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance.
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done.
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency.
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do.
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

We are committed to ensuring all candidates feel welcomed and supported. Should your application advance and you require accommodations for the interview process, please inform us so we can make the necessary arrangements.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you! If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day. It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.