Senior Experience Designer (All Genders)

zooplus SE; Bayern; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 98,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Wellbeing support

20% discount across products

Transport or bike leasing

Development opportunities

Job summary

zooplus SE is seeking a Senior UX Designer (Innovation) to shape product strategy at the intersection of user insight, technology, and business. You will collaborate with Product, Engineering and Commercial teams to frame problems and propose future-state concepts that guide roadmap decisions.

You’ll run structured discovery sprints, frame opportunities with foresight methods, and create tangible artefacts to communicate strategic direction to leaders.

Qualifications

• 4-6 years of UX or product design experience.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and define problems.
• Experience leading discovery or design sprints.
• Strong systems thinking across user, market, and tech.
• Confident presenter to senior stakeholders.
• Portfolio showing framing and impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead greenfield design exploration across new product areas and opportunities relevant to zooplus.
• Synthesize signals from user research, market trends and tech into strategic narratives.
• Develop and present future-state concepts and strategic direction frameworks.
• Run structured discovery sprints from desk research to speculative concept development.
• Explore horizon scanning and scenario planning for a 2–3 year view.
• Frame opportunities as user-centered design challenges grounded in real needs.
• Partner with Engineering early to understand feasibility and future limits.
• Create artefacts that make ideas tangible and discussable.
• Contribute a strategic UX lens into business planning discussions.
• Stay ahead of AI-assisted design and generative tooling impacts.

Skills

UX design

Product design

Strategic framing

Discovery sprint leadership

Presentation skills

Storytelling

Systems thinking

Job description

With over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier – and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

As Senior UX Designer (Innovation) at zooplus, you’ll operate at the intersection of user insight, product strategy, and technology before any of it becomes a roadmap item. zooplus serves millions of pet owners across Europe, and the opportunity to reimagine how they discover, buy, and engage with pet care is significant. In collaboration with the Head of Experience Design Strategy, you will explore possibilities that haven’t yet been framed, synthesise signals from across the business and the market, and produce strategic design directions that give teams something real to act on.

This is a deeply collaborative role. You’ll work closely with Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams to co-create the questions worth asking. You’ll be the connective tissue between what our users need, what the business can pursue, and what’s technically feasible at the frontier.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Lead greenfield design exploration, defining problem spaces, not just solving pre-scoped ones, across new product areas and business opportunities relevant to zooplus and the pet care market

• Synthesise signals from user research, market trends, competitive movements, and emerging tech into coherent strategic narratives for senior stakeholders

• Develop and present future-state concepts, design provocations, and strategic direction frameworks to Product, Engineering, and Leadership

• Run structured discovery sprints, from desk research and expert interviews through to speculative concept development, to pressure-test nascent ideas before they become commitments

• Explore foresight methods (horizon scanning, scenario planning, design fiction) to help the organisation see around corners on a 2 to 3 year view

• Frame innovation opportunities as user-centred design challenges, ensuring greenfield bets are grounded in real human needs, not just technical or commercial logic

• Partner with Engineering at an early, ambiguous stage to understand the art of the possible and bring technical feasibility into the strategic picture

• Create artefacts (concept decks, prototype narratives, experience principles, opportunity maps) that make intangible ideas tangible and discussable

• Contribute a strategic UX lens into business planning conversations, helping shape where zooplus invests its exploratory energy

• Stay ahead of how AI-assisted design and generative tooling are reshaping both the design process and the product landscape

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• 4-6 years of UX or product design experience, with a clear track record of work that went beyond execution into strategic problem framing

• Demonstrated ability to operate in ambiguity, where the problem isn’t defined and neither is the solution space

• Experience leading discovery or design sprints

• Strong systems thinking, the ability to connect insights from disparate domains (user behaviour, market dynamics, technology shifts, cultural signals) into a coherent point of view

• Confident presenter and storyteller, able to make abstract future-state concepts legible and compelling to senior, non-design audiences

• A portfolio that shows not just what you made, but what you framed, why, and what happened as a result

• Comfort sitting in the space between strategy and craft, moving fluidly between a whiteboard session and a Figma prototype that communicates a concept

• Curiosity about AI, both as a tool that changes how we design, and as a force reshaping the products and experiences we need to design for

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience in a dedicated innovation, futures, or strategic design function (in-house or consultancy)

• Exposure to ecommerce, subscription products, or multi-market consumer platforms

• Familiarity with Jobs-to-be-Done or similar frameworks for understanding latent user needs

• Experience with generative AI tools as part of a design or prototyping workflow

• Familiarity with foresight and futures methods (horizon scanning, scenario planning, speculative design), even if practised informally

WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE

• You’re comfortable walking into a discussion with a point of view, not just a deliverable

• You can spot a pattern across three unrelated data sources and articulate why it matters

• You’re as energised by the question “what problem should we even be solving?” as you are by “how do we solve it?”

• You know when to make a concept more concrete and when to keep it deliberately provocative

• You influence direction through the quality of your thinking and the clarity of how you communicate it

Headquartered in Munich, with offices across Madrid, Krakow, Wroclaw, London and Vienna, we collaborate because we genuinely love working together - so you’ll be at the heart of an incredible, multinational team. We trust each other to get the job done, which means you’ll benefit from hybrid working, spending 60% of your time in the office and 40% at home. There’s an option to work for 20 days abroad in approved countries too.

Add to that development opportunities that help you to shape your own career path, excellent training and support, wellbeing offers, subsidised transport or bike leasing, plus 20% discount across all our products, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what sets us apart. Find out more about the specific benefits at your local office in our blog posts.

A note on compensation: We believe in being transparent about salary ranges. The range shown reflects the full scope that the role can grow into over time, depending on experience, skills, and impact. Most offers are positioned around the midpoint of the range, ensuring a fair and consistent approach across our teams.

At zooplus, we believe in equal opportunity and support everyone to fulfil their potential. We recognise the power of listening and learning from each other and embrace diversity and inclusion of all.

#LI-Hybrid