Product Design Engineer
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Aluma
Product Design Engineer
Competitive
Cambridge
Fully remote
RECENTLY POSTED
Graduate
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Description

About us

We’re building an intelligent document processing platform used by customers processing

millions of pages per day. Our product sits at the heart of complex, high-volume operations, and

we work extremely closely with our customers—often on a daily basis.

We already have a high-performance, scalable platform and strong product-market fit.

Now we need to make it exceptional to use.

Why this role exists

We care deeply about product quality and user experience - but we don’t yet have someone

dedicated to driving it.

Right now:

● Design happens, but without a clear owner

● User research is informal and inconsistent

● Complex workflows exist, but aren’t always as intuitive as they could be

We’re looking for someone to change that, not by introducing a heavyweight proces - but by

doing the work, raising the bar, and making things better.

The role

We’re hiring a Product Design Engineer to take a leading role in how we design and build our

product.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role at the intersection of:

● Product thinking

● UX/UI design

● Frontend implementation

You’ll work embedded in our engineering team, partnering closely with the CTO and engineers to:

● Identify where UX matters most

● Design better solutions

● Help get them into production

● You won’t be handing off designs, you’ll be part of building the product.

The kind of problems you’ll work on:

● Designing better operational experiences for customers processing millions of

documents per day

● Helping customers get more from our platform by creating a powerful but intuitive

analytics, insights and optimisation loop

● Reducing friction in high-volume human-in-the-loop workflows, and possibly exploring

gamification to improve productivity

● Designing a new configuration experience that combines our visual automation language

with AI capabilities, scaling from simple to highly complex use cases

● Exploring ways to integrate powerful new technologies into our platform in highly intuitive

ways

These are not simple UI problems. They require strong thinking, not just good taste.

What you’ll do:

● Run practical, lightweight user research (starting with usability testing)

● Develop a deep understanding of our users, their workflows, and their constraints

● Identify high-impact opportunities to improve the product

● Design solutions that hold up under real-world complexity (edge cases, scale, failure

modes)

● Prototype quickly—often using AI tools—to explore and communicate ideas

● Work with engineers to ship improvements into production

● Raise the standard of UX and UI across everything we build

How we work:

● We optimise for progress over process

● We believe AI will fundamentally change how products are designed and built—and

we’re looking for someone excited to embrace and help lead that shift

● We expect you to actively use tools like Cursor, Copilot, or similar to accelerate your

workflow

● You should be comfortable building interactive prototypes, and open to contributing to

production UI with support from the team

● We work closely with customers—you’ll have direct access to users and real problems

● We keep hierarchy light—ownership comes from contribution and judgement, not titles

What we’re looking for:

This role is deliberately not standard. We’re looking for someone who combines strong design

thinking with a builder mindset.

You should have:

● Strong interaction design skills—you can think through complex workflows, states, and

edge cases

● The ability to structure complexity through clear flows and information architecture

● Good visual judgement—you care about clarity, hierarchy, and usability

● A track record of improving real products, not just designing concepts

● Experience working on complex, data-heavy, or workflow-driven applications

● The ability to move from problem → idea → prototype → shipped improvement

● Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to decide where to focus without being told

● Experience (or strong interest) in using AI tools to design, prototype, and build interfaces

And importantly:

● You don’t see a hard boundary between design and engineering

● You are comfortable with the idea of shipping UI to production, even if you’re not a

career frontend engineer.

What we’d like to see:

We care about both how you think and the quality of what you produce.

We’re looking for:

● A portfolio (or examples) that show:

○ Real problems, not just polished outputs

○ Your thinking, trade-offs, and iteration

○ Evidence of impact on a product or users

● Work involving:

○ Complex workflows or data-heavy interfaces

○ Meaningful interaction design, not just static screens

○ Things that made it into production

● Examples of highly polished UI work, demonstrating strong visual judgement, attention to

detail, and craft

● If you’ve built prototypes or UI using code or AI tools, we’d especially like to see that

These don’t all need to be shown in the same project—we’re interested in seeing both how you

solve real problems and how you execute at a high level of visual and interaction quality.

This role is not for you if:

● You primarily work in design tools and prefer to hand off to engineers

● You need well-defined processes before you can be effective

● You’re uncomfortable working on complex, messy problems

● You avoid edge cases, constraints, or technical detail

● You’re not interested in using AI to change how you work

What success looks like (first 3 months):

● You’ve run your first usability tests and uncovered meaningful insights

● You’ve helped ship real improvements to a core workflow or feature

● You’ve started to introduce simple, effective design and research habits

● You’ve built strong context around our users and product

Benefits

● Pension

● Annual bonus linked to company performance (revenue/profit)

● Healthcare

● Significant opportunity for career growth as we scale

Why this is interesting

● You’ll define a new capability in a growing company

● You’ll work on genuinely complex, high-impact problems

● You’ll be part of a team that values design and will engage deeply with your work

● You’ll help shape how we build products in an AI-accelerated world

If this sounds like your kind of role, we’d love to hear from you.

Culture overview
Our culture at Aluma is built on four core values: People First, Innovative, Ethical, and Balanced. Everything we do is aimed at improving people’s lives—whether through the solutions we create or the way we work together. Innovation drives us; we combine advanced document automation and machine learning with practical, real-world impact. We hold ourselves to high ethical standards—honesty, transparency, and fairness are non-negotiable. We value each individual’s potential and promote a healthy work–life balance. Led by experienced and curious founders, our team is mature, technically strong, and united by a shared commitment to making a positive difference.
Employee benefits
Flexible Hours
Flexible Working
Laptop
Learning/Development days
Wellbeing Programme
Work anywhere
Office vibe
Remote-first
Social Events
Team Building Days
Location
Leadership
Mark WightmanCTO
Tech overview
In building our cloud-native platform from the bottom up, we’ve chosen to work with technologies that both solve our challenges and are rewarding & enjoyable to work with. Our backend services are written in Go with PostgreSQL databases, deployed on Kubernetes in GCP and AWS, with redis, temporal.io, timescale and a few other third party services. Some of our core technology is written in C# and C++. Our web apps are written in Svelte and Typescript. We try to ensure our dev and test loop is short and frictionless. We're always on the lookout for other technologies and tools that will give us an advantage, and are able to move fast when we find those. Recent examples include the use of Google Gemini LLMs within our core data extraction, the adoption of TimescaleDB for storing & querying customer analytics data, and exploring how we can most effectively utilise AI coding and code review assistants.
Engineering principles
Agile Process
Automated acceptance testing
Code Reviews
Collective code ownership
Communication and collaboration
Continuous delivery
Infrastructure as code
Rapid release cycles
Unit testing
Company tech stack
Aluma
Product Design Engineer
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