Staff Product Designer

Carwow Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Salary and equity

Private healthcare

Enhanced parental leave

Car-buying perk

Life Insurance

Job summary

Carwow is seeking a Staff Product Designer to shape major marketplace experiences. You’ll own complex problems end-to-end, partner with product and engineering leadership, and raise the bar for design craft across the team.

You’ll work in an AI-native design environment, using Claude Design to prototype quickly, mentor others, and drive measurable outcomes. This senior IC role offers hybrid work, competitive salary, equity, private healthcare and parental leave.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of product design experience with a track record of leading complex, high-impact work in consumer or marketplace products.
• A high degree of AI fluency. Hands-on experience using Claude Design (or similar) as a core part of your workflow.
• Strong end-to-end craft: can move from fuzzy problem statements to production-ready design.
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace; make good decisions with incomplete information.
• Excellent communication and influence: align senior stakeholders and tell a compelling story.
• Experience mentoring designers and lifting team standards.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design for a major problem space in our marketplace.
• Prototype at pace using AI design tools to get real experiences in front of users early.
• Collaborate with engineers using AI-assisted workflows to tighten design intent and speed delivery.
• Set direction and make the case for opportunities, aligning product and engineering partners.
• Raise the craft bar through critique, mentoring, and by example.

Skills

AI fluency

Claude Design

Mentoring designers

Stakeholder influence

Product design leadership

Tools

Claude Code

Job description

OUR MISSION

To become the car-changing destination of choice. By combining technology, media and deep automotive expertise, we've turned how people buy, sell, advertise and lease cars on its head.

What started as a simple reviews site is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe. Last year alone we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service.

In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia - creators of AutoExpress and Evo magazines - doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with almost 10m subscribers and over 1.1 billion annual views, while we sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million.

And we’re a long way from done!

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Staff Product Designer to shape some of the most important experiences in our marketplace. You'll own complex, high-impact problem spaces end to end, from ambiguous discovery through to shipped, measured outcomes and raise the bar for design craft and pace across the whole team.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with real influence. You'll partner directly with product and engineering leadership, mentor other designers, and set the standard for how design work gets done at Carwow.

A note on how we work: AI fluency is integral to the role. Our design team works AI-natively. We use Claude Design (and similar tools) to move from idea to high-quality prototype in hours, not weeks, and we expect designers at this level to be genuinely fluent in this way of working, not just curious about it. If you're still designing the way teams did in 2023, this probably isn't the right role. If you've rebuilt your workflow around AI and it's made you dramatically faster and more ambitious, we'd love to talk.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Own end-to-end design for a major problem space in our marketplace. Buying, selling, or dealer-facing products. from discovery and framing through to launch and iteration
• Prototype at pace using AI design tools (Claude Design or equivalent), getting real, testable experiences in front of users and stakeholders early and often
• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers, using AI-assisted workflows to close the gap between design intent and shipped product, ideally getting hands-on in code where it speeds things up
• Set direction, not just execute: identify opportunities, make the case with evidence, and bring product and engineering partners with you
• Raise the craft bar across the team through critique, mentorship, and by making your own work an example worth following
• Champion AI-native ways of working. Sharing techniques, building reusable prompts and workflows, and helping the wider team level up
• Ground decisions in evidence, combining user research, data, and rapid experimentation

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• 7+ years of product design experience, with a track record of leading complex, high-impact work in consumer or marketplace products
• A high degree of AI fluency. Hands-on, demonstrable experience using Claude Design (or an equivalent AI design/prototyping tool) as a core part of your workflow. This is critical to the role, and we'll want to see it in your portfolio and hear about it in interviews
• Strong end-to-end craft: you can go from a fuzzy problem statement to polished, production-ready design, and everything you ship is considered
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace. You make good decisions with incomplete information and iterate quickly
• Excellent communication and influence: you can align senior stakeholders, tell a compelling story with your work, and hold your ground constructively
• Experience mentoring designers and lifting the standard of a team|

STRONGLY PREFERRED SKILLS

• Experience with Claude Code (or an equivalent AI coding agent) — enough to prototype in real code, collaborate more deeply with engineers, or ship small changes yourself
• Marketplace, e-commerce, or two-sided platform experience
• Familiarity with experimentation-driven product development (A/B testing, funnel analysis)

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

In your first six months you'll have taken ownership of a significant problem space, shipped work that measurably moves a core metric, and become someone other designers seek out — both for the quality of your craft and for how you use AI tools to work at a pace and ambition level others want to copy.

WHY CARWOW?

• Genuine scale and impact: your work is used by millions of car buyers and sellers
• An AI-forward culture where new tools and workflows are embraced, not resisted — with access to the best tooling available
• A senior, supportive design team that takes craft seriously
• Hybrid working, competitive salary and equity, private healthcare, enhanced parental leave, and a car-buying perk you'd expect from us

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU

• Hybrid working
• Competitive salary to fund that dream holiday to Bali
• Matched pension contributions for a peaceful retirement
• Share options - when we thrive, so do you!
• Vitality Private Healthcare, for peace of mind, plus eyecare vouchers
• Life Assurance for (even more) peace of mind
• Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner
• Enhanced holiday package, plus Bank Holidays
  • 28 days annual leave
  • 1 day for your wedding
  • 1 day off when you move house - because moving is hard enough without work!
  • For your third year anniversary, get 30 days of annual leave per year
  • For your tenth year anniversary, get 35 days of annual leave per year
  • Option to buy 3 extra days of holiday per year
• Work from abroad for a month
• Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies
• Bubble childcare support and discounted nanny fees for little ones
• The latest tech (Macbook or Surface) to power your gif-sending talents
• Up to £500/€550 home office allowance for that massage chair you’ve been talking about
• Generous learning and development budget to help you master your craft
• Regular social events: tech lunches, coffee with the exec sessions, lunch 8 learns, book clubs, social events/anything else you pester us for
• Refer a friend, get paid. Repeat for infinite money

Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.