Head of UX Design

About us

We are champions of rail, inspired to build a greener, more sustainable future of travel. Trainline enables millions of travellers to find and book the best value tickets across carriers, fares, and journey options through our highly rated mobile app, website, and B2B partner channels. Great journeys start with Trainline. Now Europe’s number 1 downloaded rail app, with over 135 million monthly visits and £6.3 billion in annual ticket sales, we collaborate with 270+ rail and coach companies in over 40 countries. We want to create a world where travel is as simple, seamless, eco-friendly and affordable as it should be. Today, we're a FTSE 250 company driven by our incredible team of over 1,000 Trainliners from 50+ nationalities, based across London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Edinburgh and Madrid. With our focus on growth in the UK and Europe, now is the perfect time to join us on this high-speed journey.

The role

We’ve built a category-defining experience in rail. Now we’re going beyond rail, using design to open new verticals, new journeys and new value for our customers. This brand-new leadership role leads design for that expansion from the ground up. We term that expansion, ‘New Business’ with focus on expanding our strong rail proposition into the worlds of Hotels, Car Hire, Insurance and building a compelling advertising + media offering. You’ll join a cross-functional leadership team of product, engineering, commercial and data science leaders whose mission it is to turn Trainline’s New Business ambition from vision into live propositions. You will be responsible for making the Design and UX decisions that allow Trainline to explore and build a presence in new verticals (from hotels to car hire, insurance and more), ensuring the product architecture scales in line with Trainline’s ambition. It’s a player-coach role. You’ll set the vision and lift your team’s craft while staying close enough to shape the details that decide how new propositions land and integrate into a well-oiled rail ticketing and travel product suite. More broadly you will be the connective force across the wider design org, making sure a portfolio of separate bets cohere into one Trainline experience.

In this role as the Head of UX Design, you will:

• Build seamless, connected trips. Lead the design of a more connected trip experience for our customers — so they can complete more of their booking beyond rail with Trainline, like hotel, car hire and insurance in one seamless flow.
• Establish a high experimentation culture. Run a prototyping-and-live-testing cadence that lets us enter spaces we don’t serve today quickly and cost-consciously, knowing which bets deserve a fast probe and which deserve real investment.
• Connect the portfolio. Surface the threads across our New Business bets and the wider strategy, so a set of new verticals reads as one coherent Trainline UX rather than a scatter of features, working in genuine partnership with product and engineering leaders beyond your immediate group.
• Put AI at the core of how we work. Be hands-on with AI in your own practice, and partner with UX and product leadership to advance the discipline, turning what works into the default way the team explores, tests and ships new propositions.
• Hold the bar as we move fast. Bring a world-class eye for detail to brand-new, unproven experiences, and prove craft is what makes a new vertical credible, not a tax on speed.
• Own the insight that inspires. Define compelling research roadmaps that build rich understanding of customers and journeys we don’t yet serve, and de-risk each new bet before we commit.
• Build the team behind the expansion. Manage, mentor and hire as the mission scales, shaping a culture that’s comfortable starting from zero.

We'd love to hear from you if you have:

• 0→1 leadership and impact. A track record taking consumer propositions into market and iterating on real signal. Ideally you will have opened up new categories or verticals, not just shipped features, and have the commercial impact stories to support.
• Craft and direction. The judgement to balance hands-on craft with strategy: you care about the pixels and the three-year horizon for where the business goes next.
• A sharp eye for quality. The instinct for when “good enough to learn from” beats “perfect but late” in an unproven space.
• Comfort in ambiguity. You operate at pace where the problem isn’t defined and the market isn’t proven.
• Cross-functional influence. Strong partnership with product, engineering and design leadership, carrying your rationale through clear, compelling storytelling.
• AI fluency. Genuine command of AI tooling and a strong view on how it reshapes a design discipline.
• People growth. A record of growing designers and raising a team’s bar.

More information:

Enjoy fantastic perks like private healthcare & dental insurance, a generous work from abroad policy, 2-for-1 share purchase plans, an EV Scheme to further reduce carbon emissions, extra festive time off, and excellent family-friendly benefits. We prioritise career growth with clear career paths, transparent pay bands, personal learning budgets, and regular learning days. Jump on board and supercharge your career from day one! We're operating a hybrid model and ask that Trainliners work from the office a minimum of 60% of their time over a 12-week period. We also have a 28-day Work from Abroad policy.

Our values represent the things that matter most to us and what we live and breathe every day, in everything we do:

• Think Big - We're building the future of rail
• Own It - We focus on every customer, partner and journey
• Travel Together - We're one team
• Do Good - We make a positive impact

We know that having a diverse team makes us better and helps us succeed. And we mean all forms of diversity - gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, nationality and diversity of thought. That's why we're committed to creating inclusive places to work, where everyone belongs and differences are valued and celebrated.