Design Team Lead in Newtownabbey

About Whitespace

At Whitespace, we’re an AI company for Defence, Government and Regulated Industries. We build the technology, operating model and mission-ready applications needed to move AI from proof-of-concept into real operational use. At the core of our ecosystem is Collective, our sovereign AI operating system. Collective connects governed data, domain context, reasoning and action with full audibility, security and control. It is designed to operate across cloud, edge, on-premise and fully air-gapped environments, including disconnected and classified settings. Whitespace combines this platform with a structured Solutions Engineering approach that ensures AI is delivered safely, quickly and in line with government and defence assurance requirements. Our Applied Intelligence applications, including Operational Learning and Decision Intelligence for optimisation, are deployed in live environments and demonstrate how AI can be trusted, adopted and scaled under real-world constraints.

The Role

We’re looking for a Product Design Team Lead to drive best-in-class user experience and interaction design. This is a hands-on, player-coach leadership role, responsible for managing, mentoring, and growing our team of Product Designers (currently 4 and growing). You will maintain a strong, hands-on presence while providing crucial leadership and management to the team. The role's primary focus will be on our leading-edge Collective AI Operating System, while maintaining design oversight across our portfolio of platform applications. This is a high-impact role reporting directly into our Head of Product and Design, focused on shaping the design for Collective's AI application builder, orchestration, and natural language interfaces and the design framework for our solutions engineering applications. You will set the design strategy, deliver exceptional user experience, and define how our AI-first products help solve real-world problems for critical industries. Hands-on and customer-facing, you will also own our Springboard design system, shape our design direction, and define our team’s work - choosing the best of next-gen AI-tooling to supercharge our design processes. Highly collaborative, you’ll join a close-knit, cross-functional team of product managers, designers, researchers and engineers who work together to build AI-powered applications for high impact industries.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Growth
  • Act as a player-coach, providing leadership, direction, and management to a growing team of product designers in a well funded and rapidly growing Series A startup.
  • Drive a healthy and high-quality design culture through hands-on design mentorship and peer review.
  • Build processes and supporting materials that ensures our design system and guidelines are adopted across all teams, delivering our vision of best-in-class user experience for intent driven, AI rendered user interfaces.
  • Actively identify and evaluate AI tooling and approaches that improve velocity, quality, and collaboration with product/engineering.
• Design Ownership & Execution
  • Lead the user experience and interface design across our flagship Collective Operating System, providing design oversight for the wider portfolio of platform applications.
  • Own the end-to-end design process—from early discovery and flows to final UI, prototypes, handoff and iteration.
  • Create clear, user-centred design artefacts including wireframes, flows, journey maps, and interactive prototypes for conversational design and intent-driven UI.
  • Partner closely with product managers to shape product direction and inform the roadmap.
  • Balance hands-on delivery with influencing how we make product decisions.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Influence
  • Work closely with our CTO, Heads of, product managers, researchers and engineering to deliver usable, valuable, feasible and compliant solutions.
  • Run design workshops and partner with discovery researchers to facilitate user research and understand the why.
  • Support early product framing by translating research, technical insight, and feedback into clear design direction.
  • Present design decisions clearly to internal stakeholders—both technical and non-technical.
  • Be willing to travel to customer sites on occasion, if required.

Required Experience, Skills And Attributes

• 8+ years of hands-on product design experience, ideally including enterprise, B2B environments and complex data-heavy environments.
• Proven experience in line management, mentorship, or leadership of a product design team.
• Demonstrable Generative AI and wider AI experience, including working knowledge of the latest AI-first working practices.
• Evidence of designing and shipping real, complex digital products used in production.
• Comfortable moving across multiple fidelity levels—from conceptual design and structure to detailed UI.
• Deep skills in modern design tools and prototyping practices, but with an eagerness and adaptability to identify and use next-gen tooling.
• A basic understanding of code and experience using AI tooling to move from concept to prototype is advantageous.
• A pragmatic mindset, you bias toward good-enough solutions without compromising user outcomes.
• Strong design communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Experience working in or around regulated industries, Defence, Government, or complex platforms is a plus.
• Due to UK Government and Defence customers, it is preferable that applications are willing and eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC), or hold active SC.

What We Offer

• Work on impactful, cutting-edge products powered by artificial intelligence.
• Be part of an agile, close-knit team that values creativity, quality, and continuous learning.
• Influence to shape and lead design across our flagship Collective Operating System.
• EMI Share Options in a fast growing series A startup.
• A flexible working environment, with typically 2 days of hybrid working in our Belfast office, and one of the best work-life balances you’ll find:
• A 4-day week during the holidays - July, August and December.
• Early finish every working Friday at 3pm.
• 25 days of annual leave, plus all NI bank holidays.

Join us

If you're a designer who loves solving complex problems through thoughtful, validated, hands-on design — and you're ready to lead by doing — drop us a line. Whitespace is committed to creating an inclusive, supportive environment for all team members—we welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds and experiences.