Principal UX Designer, Design Systems in Oxford

Overview

Sophos is a global leader and innovator of advanced security solutions for defeating cyberattacks. The company acquired Secureworks in February 2025, bringing together two pioneers in cybersecurity. Sophos is the largest pure-play Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider, supporting more than 28,000 organizations. Our portfolio includes endpoint, network, email, and cloud security that interoperate through the Sophos Central platform.

ROLE SUMMARY

We are looking for a Principal UX Designer to play a critical role in shaping the future of Sophos's enterprise cybersecurity platform. This is our most senior individual contributor design role, combining hands-on UX craft with ownership of our design system and experience foundations. You will be responsible for driving end-to-end experience design across critical, complex product areas, mentoring others in UX, and acting as the primary steward of our design system, ensuring it evolves in step with product needs.

You will work in close partnership with product managers, developers, researchers, and other stakeholders to uncover user needs, translate them into intuitive, scalable solutions, and help define the future direction of our cloud-native security platform. If you are passionate about designing for complexity and creating clarity at scale, creating and evolving design systems, we want to hear from you.

What you will do

• Translate user, product, and business requirements into clear, usable, and intuitive experiences.
• Lead UX design for significant product areas, collaborating closely with product managers, developers, architects, and fellow designers.
• Develop and refine information architecture, navigation models, and interaction patterns across products to ensure consistency and clarity.
• Be responsible for defining, managing, creating and evolving our design system, ensuring scalable and accessible UX patterns.
• Balance design system integrity with real product needs, knowing when to extend, refactor, or introduce new patterns.
• Drive adoption and correct usage of the design system across product teams through guidance, reviews, and enablement.
• Conduct research in collaboration with our researcher, or independently; synthesize data from interviews, analytics, internal SMEs, customer feedback, and competitive analysis.
• Lead or co-lead usability testing sessions; define test goals, write scripts, observe users, and analyze results to inform design.
• Facilitate and lead collaborative workshops (e.g., sketching, journey mapping, prioritization, concept ideation) to drive alignment and insight.
• Develop and refine information architecture across products, ensuring consistency and clarity in navigation and labeling.
• Map end-to-end user journeys and workflows to identify pain points and opportunities.
• Create wireframes, mockups, and high-fidelity interactive prototypes to communicate and validate design direction.
• Serve as a senior design voice within cross-functional teams, championing user-centered thinking and high UX standards.
• Mentor other designers through critique, pairing, and guidance on craft, systems thinking, and problem-solving.
• Support Agile development by contributing to user stories, acceptance criteria, and design QA.

What you will bring

• 7+ years of UX design experience (preferably in cybersecurity products, B2B SaaS, or enterprise software).
• Proven mastery of design systems: creating, maintaining, and evolving component libraries and interaction patterns in Figma.
• Deep passion for crafting thoughtful, elegant solutions to complex user problems.
• Extensive experience designing for large-scale, complex systems, ideally in B2B SaaS or enterprise software.
• Strong understanding of accessibility, usability heuristics, and cognitive principles that underpin high-quality UX.
• Track record of effective collaboration with product, engineering, and architecture partners.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to clearly articulate design rationale to varied audiences.
• Mastery of wireframing and prototyping tools such as Figma, along with strong visual and interaction design skills.
• Experience working in cybersecurity or another highly technical domain is strongly preferred.
• A solid portfolio demonstrating end-to-end UX work for complex systems or workflows.

Ready to Join Us?

At Sophos, we believe in the power of diverse perspectives to fuel innovation. Research shows that candidates sometimes hesitate to apply if they don’t check every box in a job description. We challenge that notion. Your unique experiences and skills might be exactly what we need to enhance our team. Don’t let a checklist hold you back – we encourage you to apply.

What’s Great About Sophos?

• Sophos operates a remote-first working model, making remote work the primary option for most employees. However, some roles may necessitate a hybrid approach.
• Our people – we innovate and create, all of which are accompanied by a great sense of fun and team spirit.
• Employee-led diversity and inclusion networks that build community and provide education and advocacy.
• Annual charity and fundraising initiatives and volunteer days for employees to support local communities.
• Global employee sustainability initiatives to reduce our environmental footprint.
• Global fitness and trivia competitions to keep our bodies and minds sharp.
• Global wellbeing days for employees to relax and recharge.
• Monthly wellbeing webinars and training to support employee health and wellbeing.

Our Commitment To You

We’re proud of the diverse and inclusive environment we have at Sophos, and we’re committed to ensuring equality of opportunity. We believe that diversity, combined with excellence, builds a better Sophos, so we encourage applicants who can contribute to the diversity of our team. All applicants will be treated in a fair and equal manner and in accordance with the law regardless of gender, sex, gender reassignment, marital status, race, religion or belief, color, age, military veteran status, disability, pregnancy, maternity or sexual orientation.

We want to give you every opportunity to show us your best self, so if there are any adjustments we could make to the recruitment and selection process to support you, please let us know.

Data Protection

If you choose to explore an opportunity, and subsequently share your CV or other personal details with Sophos, these details will be held by Sophos for 12 months in accordance with our Privacy Policy and used by our recruitment team to contact you regarding this or other relevant opportunities at Sophos. If you would like Sophos to delete or update your details at any time, please follow the steps set out in the Privacy Policy describing your individual rights.