Lead Product Designer in London

At Thriva, we're on a mission to close the gap between lifespan and healthspan. While people are living longer, they're also spending more years in poor health. We help people live better now, and for longer, with proactive at‑home blood testing, connected wearables, doctor‑reviewed results, and personalised actions backed by evidence.

We're building a first‑of‑its‑kind proactive health app, combining deep clinical insight with human‑centred design, conversational coaching, and increasingly sophisticated data insight. As Lead Product Designer, you will bring craft from unpacking the shape of the problem to the pixels in production, and set the bar for design quality across the company. We are looking for a designer who sees design as a creative problem-solving exercise, who knows how to explore a solution space and then select and refine creative UX solutions in production in partnership with product and engineering. This might mean inventing novel patterns when they're warranted, and it will always mean designing experiences that meet people where they actually are in their health journey. If you're the kind of designer who is energised rather than daunted by tackling messy human problems head on, this is for you.

This is a hands‑on role across an exciting product portfolio. You'll be the senior design voice in a lean, fast‑moving team: setting direction, holding the quality bar, and doing the craft yourself. If that combination of strategic ownership and getting‑your‑hands‑dirty excites you, you'll thrive here.

We're a purposefully small team that moves fast. Our CTO Founder writes code, our Product Director runs user interviews, and our Product Managers prototype in code. Designers and engineers work shoulder to shoulder, increasingly using the latest AI tools to accelerate both the design and the build of first‑class experiences. We're looking for someone excited by that way of working and ready to help us define how design operates as we grow our impact and pace in a fast-moving market.

What you'll own as our design lead:

• Set and hold the design vision across the entire Thriva journey — physical and digital — from the at‑home sampling experience through to the app, results, insights, and coaching.
• Carry Thriva's design‑led heritage forward and raise the standard of design thinking across the team.
• Constantly connect the dots across touchpoints so the product feels like one considered, coherent whole rather than a set of features.
• Define how design works at Thriva.
• Shape our ways of working at lead level: how designers and engineers collaborate day to day, and how we keep quality high while moving fast with prototyping and AI tooling.
• Own the review and approval of new additions to the design system, keeping it consistent, scalable, and a genuine accelerator for the team.
• Establish the rituals, standards, and guardrails that let a lean team ship first‑class work quickly with the right cross‑functional input.
• Act as the guardian of a single, coherent experience across every touchpoint — visually, in interaction, and in tone.
• Ensure clinical insight, data, and content come together in interfaces that feel calm, trustworthy, and unmistakably Thriva.
• Represent design in product and whole‑team conversations, and advocate for both the user and the craft, supporting an understanding of design‑led thinking as the route to world-class product experiences.
• Bring others along with your thinking, mentor and raise the level of those around you, and influence product strategy with a strong design perspective.

Key Responsibilities:

• Solve hard product problems with creativity and rigour.
• Explore the solution space for ambiguous, novel problems and create patterns that genuinely meet users where they are.
• Design for real behaviour change — building experiences that encourage healthy action, habit‑building, and reflection in the real world.
• Balance engagement with restraint, avoiding dark patterns or addictive mechanics in favour of meaningful, lasting impact over months and years.
• Design for native mobile first, with deep care for platform conventions, performance, and the details that make an app feel premium and trusted.
• Translate clinical insights, health metrics, trends, and recommendations into intuitive, calm, and empowering interfaces that don't overwhelm but stay accurate and credible.
• Collaborate deeply across a lean, fast‑moving team.
• Partner with product managers who prototype in code — designing in tight, iterative loops.
• Work with engineers using the latest AI tools to accelerate design and build, raising the bar on quality and pace at the same time.
• Collaborate with clinicians, data scientists, and content teams to bring progressive, evidence‑backed health information into the experience in a way that supports users where they are.
• Align with brand and marketing creatives to extend and evolve Thriva's visual identity, bringing it to life through the product.
• Stay close to users and product outcomes.
• Run user research, bringing a range of methodologies and best practice to ensure we build from the best insight into our customers.
• Iterate based on evidence, while applying strong design judgement and taste.

About You:

• You have significant depth and breadth designing digital products, and a track record of solving complex problems with creative solutions.
• You've owned the design direction for a product or experience end to end — not just delivered against someone else's vision. You have evolved a product over time, with users, into something people return to.
• You have strong native mobile expertise and care about the details that make an app feel first‑class.
• You're comfortable in ambiguity, able to explore a wide solution space and invent novel patterns when existing ones don't fit.
• You're fluent in Figma, hands‑on with design systems, and confident owning and evolving a component library alongside engineers (e.g. via Storybook).
• You enjoy a collaborative, fast way of working and embrace new technologies, partnering with PMs who prototype in code and engineers using the latest AI tools to move quickly without sacrificing quality.
• You can set and defend ways of working, raise the level of those around you, and act as the voice for design in cross‑functional conversations.
• You understand how design influences behaviour, and care about doing this ethically and responsibly to create real health impact.
• You're energised by hard human problems and motivated by meaningful work, particularly in health, wellbeing, and long‑term impact.
• You're humble, curious, and happy to operate at both the strategic and the pixel‑perfect level across a broad remit, seeing opportunity in connecting the dots.

Why Join Thriva?

• Help shape the future of proactive, preventative health.
• Play a defining role in evolving a product used by hundreds of thousands of people.
• Work with a mission‑driven, collaborative team that genuinely cares about quality and impact.
• Hybrid, flexible working (minimum 2 days per week in our Old Street office).
• Free Thriva testing (of course).
• Very competitive salary with regular reviews.
• Equity options.
• Pension contributions of 3%.
• Annual 'treat yourself' budget.
• Annual learning and development budget.
• Private health cover with BUPA.
• Enhanced parental leave.