Founding Designer

Listing Monster builds AI-powered tools that help businesses and charities run their entire e-commerce operation in the global $360Bn resale market — from sourcing and listing through to shipping and business intelligence. We’re looking for someone to take our customer experience to the next level. We’re a small, experienced team building practical software that solves real commercial problems using AI. We care about thoughtful engineering, clean solutions, and having impact with real customers — not hype.

About Listing Monster: We have over 150 active customers, including a large number of UK charities, and growing traction with independent resellers. We expect to process 2 million items in the next 12 months. We’ve found strong product–market fit and are scaling quickly. Until now, we’ve supported customers closely — particularly at the enterprise level — to ensure they succeed with the platform. That approach doesn’t scale. The next stage is making the product intuitive enough to stand on its own. Customers need to be able to onboard themselves, understand how to use the system, and get full value without heavy support. Solving this well is critical — and it’s primarily a product and design problem.

Who This Role Is For: This is not a “mid-level stepping stone” role. This is for someone who:

• Has high standards and is often dissatisfied with the quality of most products
• Has personally driven meaningful product decisions, not just executed on them
• Thinks beyond design into product, commercial context, and outcomes
• Can take a vague problem and turn it into something clear, usable, and shipped
• Is comfortable being the only designer and setting the bar for design

You should be able to point to work where:

• You made something significantly simpler, faster, or more commercially effective
• Your decisions improved not just UX, but conversion, retention, or efficiency
• You considered engineering cost and constraints, not just ideal design outcomes
• You can explain not just what you did, but why it mattered to the business

If you’re primarily looking for mentorship, structure, or well-defined briefs, this role likely isn’t a fit.

What You’ll Actually Be Doing: You’ll be:

• Working directly with founders on what we should build, why, and in what order
• Owning design from problem → concept → shipped product
• Turning ambiguous problems into clear product direction, user flows, and priorities
• Designing interfaces that prioritise clarity, speed, and real-world use
• Making product and design trade-offs in the context of business goals
• Considering build cost, technical constraints, and time-to-ship as part of every decision
• Establishing how design is done — tools, standards, patterns, expectations
• Improving the product continuously based on real usage, customer behaviour, and commercial impact
• Thinking deeply about edge cases, failure modes, and system behaviour

There’s no separation between “strategy”, “product”, and “design” here.

What We’re Looking For:

• Essential: Strong product design fundamentals and sharp UX judgment
• Clear evidence of end-to-end ownership of real product work
• Ability to simplify complex problems without losing important detail
• Demonstrated ability to make decisions in the context of business goals and constraints
• Comfort discussing trade-offs between user experience, engineering effort, and commercial impact
• High proficiency in tools like Figma — but strong judgment about when fidelity matters
• Strong communication — you can explain and defend decisions clearly
• Comfortable working directly with customers, engineers and founders

Strong signals:

• Experience in early-stage startups or building products from scratch
• Evidence of influencing product direction or roadmap, not just design output
• Work that shows restraint, prioritisation, and focus on outcomes
• Case studies that demonstrate commercial awareness (e.g. conversion, revenue, efficiency)
• You’ve redesigned or rebuilt something because the existing solution wasn’t good enough and done it in a way which was buildable
• You understand how the products you design fit into how businesses actually operate

What It’s Like to Work Here: Small team, low ego. Direct, honest communication. Pragmatic decisions over process or ceremony. Real customers using what we build. We’re a startup, but we’re not chaotic. We think carefully and move deliberately. We have an experienced founding team and great investors who believe in our vision. Design here is not decoration. It’s how we make complex things usable — and how we decide what to build in the first place. We build tools that help people run their businesses. Understanding that context matters. As the Founding Designer, you’ll define what “good” looks like across product, design, and decision-making.

Salary & Benefits: Salary Range: £80,000 – £100,000. Benefits: Private Healthcare, 25 days holiday, pension. Location: Hybrid, with at least 3 days per week in our London office (SE1 9PG). We’re looking for clarity of thinking, quality of judgment, and evidence of ownership. Polished visuals are a bonus. They’re not the point.