Senior Product Designer, Video Editing Tools in Southampton

We are looking for a senior product designer who has designed a tool that editors work inside, not a video editor and not another AI engineer.

About the product: We build software that produces finished video using generative models. A user defines their cast from a handful of reference photos, describes the piece they want, and the product plans it as a storyboard, generates each shot, places the subject against a background, adds captions and music, and delivers a finished cut. Work that would take an editor and a small crew a full day is designed to take one person an afternoon.

What you'll own:

• The editing surface end to end: timeline, preview, transport, selection model, and keyboard map
• The generation-to-edit handoff: how AI-produced shots enter a timeline, and how a user fixes or re-rolls one without losing the rest of the cut
• Interface economics: making cost and time clear without turning the product into a billing screen
• The compositing and keying experience, turning filter parameters into controls users can judge by eye
• Captions and titling, including type, timing, safe areas, vertical and horizontal formats, and non-Latin scripts
• The information architecture of a project (cast, locations, boards, shots, versions, renders), currently managed only through folders
• A design system built for a dense, dark, canvas-first application
• Working prototypes as a primary deliverable, not just specifications

Requirements:

• 7+ years designing software products, including 3+ years on a professional creative or media tool that shipped to real users (video, motion, audio, colour, DAW, compositing, or animation tooling)
• Experience shipping a real editing timeline with a selection model, trim behaviour, and snapping, with the ability to explain decisions around ripple, roll, slip, and slide
• Strong fluency in NLE concepts: bins, sequences, in and out points, nesting, proxies, render states, title safe, reframing, and the difference between preview and delivery quality
• Experience designing for both keyboard-first power users and first-time users within a single product
• Ability to build functional prototypes (in code, After Effects, Origami, or similar), in addition to Figma
• Comfort reading the code you design for, including understanding what the rendering pipeline can and cannot do
• A portfolio that shows deep ownership of at least one tool, including the decisions made and the tradeoffs in hindsight

Preferred experience:

• Background on CapCut, Final Cut Pro, Premiere, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Descript, Runway, Frame.io, Avid, InShot, VN, or a comparable in-house editing tool at scale
• Experience designing masking, rotoscoping, keying, or background-removal interfaces
• Experience designing a subtitle or caption editor, including non-Latin scripts
• Experience with mobile-first vertical video editing
• Experience making generative, render-farm, or cloud-export costs visible to users
• Experience transitioning a tool from engineer-built forms to a fully designed product

This role is not: a video editing or motion design position, an AI or ML engineering role, a generalist product design role covering dashboards or marketing sites, or a purely visual design role. The core challenge is designing behaviour under latency, cost, and non-determinism.

Interview process:

• Portfolio deep-dive (60 minutes): a detailed walkthrough of one tool you shipped
• Critique session (45 minutes): reviewing and critiquing our current interface
• Paid design exercise (approximately 3 hours): a brief drawn from our real roadmap
• Working session with the founder on live product decisions

Location: Fulham, London

Contract type: Contract, 2 to 3 months

To apply: Please send your portfolio along with a one-page note on an editing tool you did not design, identifying one interaction you believe is wrong, why, and what you would replace it with. Please name the timeline you shipped in your first line.