Senior UX Design Engineer

Orbital is the AI platform for real estate legal work. Real estate shapes the world around us: our homes, our workplaces and our cultural landmarks. It’s the infrastructure that powers everyday life and is the world's largest asset class. Yet behind every single deal, real estate and legal teams work hard to navigate decades-old complexity; manually connecting documents, hidden obligations, geo-spatial context, and multiple parties into a path forward. We connect the legal and physical record, so that path is clearer than ever before. Our mission is to make real estate transactions faster, clearer, and less manual.

As a Senior UX Design Engineer, you'll own some of the hardest problems in our product and see them through until they're solved. You'll join our design team, three designers today and growing, and work inside our teams alongside product managers and our product, legal and AI engineers (our legal engineers are former real estate lawyers). We've built a product that real estate lawyers rely on, and now we're also building for the businesses that own, occupy and develop property. You'll work across both, and much of it is new ground. Nobody here has the full answer yet, and that's the job: you'll get to know the people we build for, work out what they need from us, and build it.

This role is not about polishing screens. Our product is live and trusted by some of the most demanding real estate lawyers and property teams in the world. The hardest design problems here are not about how it looks. They are about whether people can trust it and get their work done. Your starting point is the users, their work and the product: you notice what isn't working, decide what matters most, and see it through, from the first customer conversation to the version they use. Here, designers build what they design. With AI coding tools, you'll build your designs into the product yourself, often live for customers the next day. When anyone can build, judgement matters most, and that is the heart of this role.

What You'll Be Doing

• Find out who you're building for: talk to customers and map who does what inside law firms and property businesses.
• Design how people work with our AI agents, which do real work on their behalf.
• Solve first, then refine: get to the right answer with rough, working versions in front of real people, and add polish once the problem is solved.
• Build and ship interface changes yourself, using AI coding tools in our codebase.
• Keep the product coherent while everyone builds: engineers, legal engineers, product people and coding agents all build interfaces here.
• Explain why one option beats another so people can make the call themselves.

You should apply if:

• You go after the hard problem, not the surface one, and own it until it's solved.
• You judge your work by whether people use it, rely on it and come back.
• You're comfortable not knowing yet.
• You bring design excellence and strong product sense.
• You'd rather guide people than overrule them.
• You're genuinely excited about AI.
• You want to learn how property and legal work gets done.
• You have owned and shipped product design work.

Desirable

• Experience designing AI products.
• Experience in legal tech, fintech, compliance or another field where precision and professional accountability shape every decision.
• Side projects, hackathons or things you've built outside work.
• Design systems and accessibility experience.
• Experience at an early-stage or fast-scaling startup.

Reasons we might not be for you

• The pace is fast and our ways of working keep evolving.
• If you prefer clear boundaries between design and engineering, this may not be the role for you.

Why you'll love it here

• You'll join a collaborative, highly ambitious team where the standard is high and the ownership is real.
• Your work is used by lawyers and property teams on real deals and real buildings.

How we hire

• A short call with our recruiter.
• A 30-minute video call with the hiring manager.
• A design task.
• A 90-minute panel.
• A final conversation with our CTO.

Benefits

• Competitive salary.
• Equity options in a fast-growing startup.
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.
• £1,000 personal development budget and learning opportunities.
• Company pension, healthcare, eye care and enhanced parental leave.
• Free lunch on Wednesdays, and a Deliveroo budget for late nights.
• Cycle-to-work scheme.
• Regular team off-sites, shared lunches and social events.

Security is everyone’s responsibility at Orbital. We ask all team members to follow our security policies, complete regular awareness training, and handle sensitive data with care in line with ISO 27001 standards. At Orbital, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We especially welcome applications from people who are traditionally underrepresented in tech.