Principal Product Designer

Principal Product Designer

Candyspace is seeking an exceptional Principal Product Designer to join our growing UX & Design team. You will lead complex, high value product and service design work for global clients, shaping projects from early opportunity definition through to research, UX strategy, UI design, validation and delivery. You will be trusted to operate with senior stakeholders, define the right design approach, align teams around clear outcomes and translate complex business and user needs into simple, scalable digital experiences.

You are a systems thinker who sees beyond individual screens to the wider product, service and organisational ecosystem. You combine strong strategic judgement with excellent hands on craft, and are comfortable moving between discovery, facilitation, research, IA, prototyping, design systems, accessibility and delivery.

You will play a key role in raising the quality of Candyspace's design practice, mentoring designers, improving ways of working and helping the team deliver consistently excellent work. You will also play a leading role in helping Candyspace adopt AI within the design practice, exploring how AI tools and workflows can improve research, ideation, prototyping, delivery and team productivity. You will help identify practical use cases, share knowledge across the team, and contribute to building a progressive, responsible and human centred approach to AI enabled design.

Ideally you will have 10+ years' experience working across complex digital products and services, either in agency, consultancy or in house product environments.

Specific tasks include but are not limited to:

• User research
• Research advocacy - Champions research and testing as essential to design practice, mentors others and helps improve the way Candyspace approaches research.
• Research & validation - Defines and leads appropriate research and testing approaches across complex projects, selecting the right methods across qualitative, quantitative, behavioural and attitudinal research.
• Conducting research - Leads interviews and research sessions with confidence, empathy and emotional intelligence, including with challenging or senior participants.
• Synthesis - Synthesises complex findings into clear strategic insight, reviews the research work of others and helps build confidence across the team.
• Problem definition and ideation
• Mapping - Uses journey maps, service blueprints and experience maps to align stakeholders, reveal opportunities and influence product or service change.
• Ideas generation - Leads high quality ideation sessions with clients and teams, selecting the right techniques for the problem and driving ideas towards testable, original solutions.
• Information architecture
• Structural focus - Thinks beyond interfaces to design scalable systems, structures and content relationships that support complex products and services.
• IA & navigation - Creates intuitive IA and navigation models that reduce cognitive load, improve decision making and help users complete tasks efficiently.
• IA diagrams - Produces clear, robust IA diagrams and supporting materials for complex product ecosystems, showing rationale and helping others understand future use.
• Wireframing & prototyping
• Solution design - Translates complex business and user problems into simple, coherent product and service experiences with a clear link between need and solution.
• Wireframing - Creates highly structured wireframes that communicate hierarchy, interaction and system logic clearly, giving UI designers and developers a strong foundation.
• Prototyping - Builds sophisticated prototypes to simulate complex journeys, interactions and logic, using prototypes to validate thinking and reduce delivery risk.
• UI design
• Look & feel - Defines compelling visual directions rooted in product strategy, brand, emotional proposition and user needs.
• Hierarchy & relationships - Establishes coherent design languages with strong hierarchy, consistency and attention to detail across complex experiences.
• Supporting the UX - Ensures UI strengthens usability, clarity, wayfinding, decision making and task completion across the product.
• Design systems - Designs and evolves scalable design systems, including component libraries, token structures, governance processes and adoption across teams.
• Accessibility & inclusivity
• Mindset - Champions accessibility and inclusive design as fundamental to better design and better business outcomes.
• Understanding barriers - Demonstrates deep understanding of diverse user barriers and embeds inclusive thinking into product, service and system design.
• Fundamentals - Stays current on accessibility standards, uses appropriate tools and supports the Experience Director in keeping team knowledge and practice up to date.
• User empathy & advocacy
• Empathy - Places people at the centre of design decisions and helps others translate human needs, behaviours and mental models into meaningful products.
• Connecting with users - Crafts experiences that create trust, emotional connection and satisfaction while balancing originality, usability and strategic intent.
• Advocacy - Confidently advocates for users, accessibility and inclusive testing with clients, stakeholders and internal teams.
• AI proficiency
• AI enabled design - Uses AI tools confidently to accelerate research, synthesis, ideation, content creation, prototyping and documentation. Understands when to leverage AI for speed and when human judgement is required.
• Suggesting AI solutions - Understands how AI capabilities can solve user and business problems through automation, personalisation, recommendation engines and intelligent assistance. Able to identify appropriate opportunities for AI within digital products and services.
• Human centred AI experiences - Understands the principles of transparency, trust, explainability and user control when designing AI powered experiences. Ensures human needs remain at the centre of AI enabled products.
• AI adoption in design - Helps shape how Candyspace uses AI across the design practice, sharing knowledge, testing workflows and encouraging responsible experimentation.
• Designing AI experiences
• Conversational AI design - Experience designing chat based experiences, copilots, assistants or conversational interfaces that help users complete tasks naturally and efficiently.
• AI agents & multi agent systems - Experience designing workflows involving AI agents, orchestration, task delegation or autonomous systems operating on behalf of users.
• Human in the loop design - Experience designing products where humans and AI collaborate effectively, balancing automation, oversight, intervention and decision making.
• AI first product experience - Experience taking AI powered products from discovery and concept development through to validation, launch and optimisation.
• Basic Qualifications (BQ):
• A strong design leader, able to influence clients, stakeholders and teams through clarity, credibility and excellent communication.
• A confident facilitator and collaborator, able to bring users, clients, designers, developers, product owners and senior stakeholders together around shared outcomes.
• A strategic self starter, comfortable shaping direction from ambiguity and defining the right design approach for complex challenges.
• Solutions focused, commercially aware and able to balance user needs, business value, technical feasibility and delivery constraints.
• Passionate about mentoring and raising the quality of design work across the team.
• Curious and proactive about AI and emerging technologies, actively exploring how they can enhance design processes, improve customer experiences and create measurable business value while maintaining a strong human centred design mindset.
• Detail oriented and craft focused, with strong judgement around when to push quality and when to move pragmatically.
• Friendly, open and generous with knowledge, contributing positively to the wider Candyspace culture.

What is in it for you:

• Join one of the world's fastest-growing AI-first digital engineering companies and make a real impact at scale.
• Lead and collaborate with a high-energy team of talented, driven individuals solving complex, meaningful challenges.
• Work with Fortune 500 companies and disruptive innovators in a research-driven environment with 60+ patents.
• Stay ahead of the curve by gaining hands-on experience with cutting-edge AI, ML, data, and cloud technologies while continuously upskilling.

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you'll enjoy your career with us!