Fractional Founding Product Designer (UX, UI & Research)

Bite Engineering; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Early equity

Leadership opportunity

Job summary

Bite is seeking its first in-house product designer to own the entire design function. You will turn a working prototype into a trusted experience for bid and risk teams, and ensure longevity as the project scales.

You’ll work hands-on with leaders in product and technology to shape the design language and user journeys. You’ll own UX/UI for the product, run interviews, usability tests and workshops, and collaborate with customers in real time to build flows, prototypes and a consistent brand

Qualifications

• 5+ years as a hands-on product designer in startups or agencies.
• Portfolio showing complex data, tooling or multi-step workflows.
• Hands-on research experience without a dedicated research team.
• Strong UX and UI skills, including proficient use of Figma.
• Ability to ship rapidly with incomplete information and iterate.

Responsibilities

• Set the design direction and build our design system and UI patterns from the ground up.
• Design how bid and risk teams review an auto-built risk register and trace numbers to sources.
• Design how site teams record risk treatments during delivery for clean data.
• Shape product vision and roadmap with customers, running interviews and usability tests.
• Turn ideas into flows, wireframes and prototypes understood by users.
• Own the brand across product, marketing site and investor decks.

Skills

Product design

Data tooling

UX/UI design

Figma

User research

Rapid shipping

Tools

Figma

Design system

Job description

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Product

Compensation

• £75K – £85K • Offers Equity

The role

Join Bite as our first in-house designer. You'll own the entire design function and turn a working prototype into an experience bid and risk teams trust with a live tender, and site teams keep using through years of delivery. This role is for a hands‑on designer who makes complex data and tooling feel simple, and who deeply cares about clarity and usability. You don't need to have worked in construction, and nobody expects you to arrive knowing what a bill of quantities is. We'll teach you.

You'll work closely with Florence Jumpp, our CPO, who was founding product manager on BeZero Carbon's risk‑pricing platform for carbon markets and who studied psychology at Oxford. You'll also work with Phil Cowans, our fractional CTO, who co‑founded Songkick and Nested as CTO and studied Bayesian machine learning at Cambridge (the maths behind probabilistic risk pricing).

Why join Bite

The problem is genuinely hard. A tender pack is thousands of pages of drawings, specifications, contracts and bills of quantities, with a tight deadline for bids. Bite turns it into a risk register and a priced bid for the director signing off the bid, then keeps it alive for the site team treating those risks years later. Both are experts, sceptical of AI, who will ask where every number came from. Making that working legible without burying them in text is a design problem as much as a modelling one.

You'll own the UX/UI for the whole product, not a slice of it. There's no design team to inherit, no legacy UI and no feature factory to work around: just a prototype nobody is precious about. You set the direction, the patterns and the quality bar, and you'll prototype, test and ship rapidly with a small team that can pivot, fast.

You'll design it in the room with the customer. We're co‑developing the product on real data with some of the world's largest general contractors. You'll hear what works and what doesn't directly from bid and risk teams.

What we're building

Today, contractors set the risk premium on instinct: a top‑50 risk register in Excel, scored by hand, with treatments that are often suboptimal and rarely followed through. Decades of completed‑project data sit in archives that are never really used, and nine in ten construction projects still run over budget or schedule.

Bite ingests the whole tender pack, auto‑builds the risk register for the team to review, and prices it with Monte Carlo simulation reconciled against a reference class of similar completed projects. Through delivery, an AI auditor tracks risks and treatments, and every completed project improves the next tender.

What you’ll do

• Set the design direction and quality bar, and build our design system and UI patterns from the ground up.
• Design how bid and risk teams review an auto‑built risk register and trace every number to its source, keeping it simple however complex the model underneath.
• Design how site teams record risk treatments during delivery, so the data stays clean and the margin forecast stays honest.
• Shape the product vision and roadmap with customers, running the interviews, usability tests and workshops that turn insight into journeys, wireframes and prototypes.
• Turn half‑formed ideas and whiteboard sketches into flows that users understand and trust.
• Own the brand across every touchpoint, from the product to our marketing site and investor decks.

What we need from you

• 5+ years as a hands‑on product designer, including zero-to-one work at a startup or agency.
• A portfolio showing complex data, tooling or multi‑step workflows made simple and clear.
• Hands‑on research experience, such as interviews, usability testing and behavioural analysis, without a research team behind you.
• Equal strength in UX and UI, from intuitive flows to high‑quality visual craft in Figma.
• A track record of shipping fast with incomplete information, and the judgement to know when good enough is good enough.
• The habit of thinking beyond the happy path: error states, edge cases and messy data, designed before they reach code.
• Product sense: you frame the problem, define how success is measured, and can show how your work moved those numbers.
• Confidence working directly with founders: drawing clarity out of ambiguity and pushing back when necessary.

What will make you stand out

• Designing for expert users who are sceptical of automation, in fields such as finance, insurance, legal or engineering.
• Building working prototypes with AI‑native design and coding tools.
• Designing tools used in the field as well as at a desk.

Don't rule yourself out if you haven't worked in construction; we hire for craft and judgement.

What you can expect from us

• Early‑team equity: the numbers on the table at the first conversation.
• Genuine ownership of what we work on and how our culture develops.
• An entire design function to build, and the authority that comes with owning it.
• The chance to grow into our first design leader as the team grows.
• A domain you'll learn deeply: how contractors price and manage risk, and how AI holds up in front of experts who notice immediately when it's wrong.
• Tight feedback loops with customers, so you'll see how a design performed within days of shipping it.

Compensation Range: £75K - £85K