Product Design Lead

distilled; Dublin; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Life insurance

Fully-paid healthcare

5% pension contribution

Job summary

Distilled is seeking a Product Design Lead in Dublin who excels at UI design and combines strong design leadership with user advocacy and commercial impact. You will drive user engagement and collaborate closely with teams to enhance the design vision of Daft's marketplace, focusing on creating high-quality user experiences. The role promises an exciting environment where your expertise can significantly contribute to business growth and user satisfaction.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in Product or UX Design experience with leadership capacity.
• Exceptional ability to deliver high-fidelity user interface designs.
• Strong grasp of user research and usability testing principles.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product Managers to enhance user engagement.
• Model high standards for design quality and execution.
• Define and evolve design vision for Daft's marketplace.

Skills

UI/UX Design Craft

Commercial Awareness

User Research & Testing

Process Design/Improvement

Collaboration

Communication

Tools

Figma

Miro

Job description

What’s the Opportunity

Daft.ie is Ireland’s largest property portal, with a mission to make buying and selling property simple for everyone across the country. With over 3 million users visiting our website and apps every month, we’re driven by the opportunity to enhance the home buying and selling experience. If you’re excited to do impactful work that reaches hundreds of thousands of people daily, this could be the perfect role for you.

We’re seeking a Product Design Lead who is a great UI designer and can combine strong Design leadership with a focus on user advocacy and measurable commercial impact.

What will I be doing?

Champion User Value and Drive Marketplace Impact

• Partner with Product Managers to craft experiences that drive user engagement, conversion and advertiser success.
• Use research and data to find friction points in the user journey and identify high-impact opportunities that support Daft’s commercial strategy.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Commercial teams to connect user value with business objectives.

Lead and Elevate the Design Function and Hands-On Execution

• Model high standards for design quality and execution, with a strong emphasis on UX/UI craft.
• Establish and evolve design processes that align closely with product delivery rhythms, ensuring design is a strategic partner, not a downstream function.
• Guide, mentor and inspire a small team of two experienced and talented product designers, fostering growth, collaboration and accountability.
• Lead user testing and usability validation, ensuring every major release improves experience and engagement.
• Collaborate closely with engineers to ensure smooth handover and pixel-perfect execution.

Shape Design Vision and Strategy

• Define a compelling design vision for Daft’s marketplace, ensuring clarity and consistency across web and app platforms.
• Champion the user’s perspective while balancing the realities of business goals, timelines, and technical constraints.
• Drive continuous evolution of our design system to enable scalability, speed and cohesive brand expression.

What skills and experience do I need

• 6+ years in Product or UX Design, including 6-12 months in a leadership or mentorship capacity.
• Commercial Awareness: Demonstrated experience delivering designs that move business metrics, such as engagement, monetisation, or retention, while prioritising user needs.
• Strong UI/UX Design Craft: Exceptional ability to deliver high-fidelity, polished user interface designs and prototypes, informed by strong strategic design thinking.
• UX Craft & Research: Strong grasp of user research, usability testing, and behaviour-driven design, using insights to inform decisions. Experience using
• Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Experienced in combining qualitative insights (interviews, usability testing) with quantitative data (analytics, experimentation, surveys) to inform strategy and validate design hypotheses. Skilled in leveraging insights from Hotjar, Wootric and Google Analytics to identify opportunities, measure impact and enhance user experience.
• Process design / improvement: Experience in improving design processes and working to ensure that the design team is set up for success.
• Tools & Systems: Expert in Figma, Miro, and modern design system management, with an understanding of front-end technologies.
• Collaboration: Able to work effectively with Product Managers and Engineers, translating between user empathy, product priorities and business impact.
• Communication: A natural storyteller who can articulate design rationale clearly to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Why This Role Matters

Design is central to Daft’s mission of simplifying property for everyone. As Product Design Lead, you’ll:

• Shape how millions of users experience Ireland’s leading property marketplace.
• Nurture and mentor a design team that thrives on clarity, impact, and collaboration.
• Partner closely with senior product and business leaders to design solutions that balance user value and commercial success.

This is a role for a designer who is a master of UI/UX craft and also thinks strategically, someone who sees design as a lever for business growth, and who’s ready to leave a tangible mark on how Ireland moves home.

What’s it like to work here

You will have the opportunity to work with one of Ireland's fastest growing Internet companies. You will get the chance to create a significant contribution to our strategic direction. Projects are exciting and employees are given wide scope for creativity and innovation.

Benefits - what you can expect

• Our goal is to maintain a culture where people look forward to work – whether in our centrally located office in Dublin or working from home.
• We do that by making Distilled a place you'll be listened to and trusted to do your job. Where you can have fun, learn and feel appreciated. And where you get focused career development, growth and progression opportunities.
• We want you to feel confident that this is the right place for you, your career, your wellbeing and your future.
• Above all, your health and wellbeing are at the forefront of how we build the business. That means looking after you while you're here and later in life. So you'll receive life insurance, fully-paid healthcare and a 5% contribution towards your pension.

More about Distilled

We exist to make buying and selling in Ireland simple.

We put our people first, creating an inclusive environment where we can develop products that put our users first. We value people’s work and time, creating a community where they have an opportunity to make an impact and grow.

Our challenge is to enhance our market-leading products using insights and empathy to present our users with the perfect match.

What we build is technology, but what we do is create connections for life’s most meaningful moments. We are Distilled and we bring people together.

Our Values

We have five core values: We have a growth mindset. We like to simplify things and make things happen. We collaborate across teams, business units and brands. We’re passionate about what we do.

These values give us a framework for leadership and daily decision making. They embody how we behave and present ourselves — as individuals and as a business — both internally and externally for our colleagues, our users and our customers.

We are a diverse bunch of people here in Distilled, and we want to continue to attract and retain a diverse range of people into our Company. We do not discriminate based on gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race and membership of the Traveller community.