Founding Product Designer

Founding Product Designer

At Adclear, we're building the trust layer for how the world's most regulated companies bring products to market. Every bank, lender and investment platform runs into the same invisible pain: compliance review that slows down every campaign, every launch, every idea. We're turning the function that has always said 'no' into infrastructure that says 'yes, and here's how'.

This is a fundamental shift in how regulated industries and compliance teams operate, and we're only at the beginning. The product you'll design is what people actually touch when they experience that shift.

Founded in 2024, we've already earned the trust of leading innovators as well as established enterprises including Monzo, Lloyds, PensionBee, Kraken, Coinbase and many others. Our early traction let us raise 2.6m in funding, and we're now scaling fast. We're building the product engine that turns a genuinely novel category into something people love to use, and this is where you come in.

The Basics

Location: London (4 days a week in our Farringdon office)

Reports to: founders, working day to day alongside our CTO

The role: our first dedicated designer, owning the product experience end to end

The Role

You'd be the first designer at Adclear. Today, design here is developer-led and largely AI/vibe-coded, with no single owner. That's the gap you're filling: the product's look, feel and flow are yours to mold, and the design function is yours to build from the ground up.

This role has two distinct halves, and we're looking for someone who can genuinely do both.

The first is improving what already exists. Adclear is a live product used regularly by enterprises and other customers. You'll bring coherence to the UI, refine and properly apply our existing design system across the app, improve existing functionality, and design complex new features on top of it. Strong UX judgment matters as much as UI polish here: a lot of this is making genuinely complex, regulated workflows navigable for non-technical users like compliance reviewers and marketers.

The second is zero-to-one. We'll likely be building two new product lines from scratch alongside the core product, which means heavy discovery, lots of proof-of-concepts, and rapid iteration through quick mockups, AI-assisted prototypes and user testing. You'll be speaking with customers regularly across both workstreams, not just the new ones.

You won't be handed tidy specs and asked to make them pretty. You'll sit in the messy middle: talking to compliance teams and marketers at banks and fintechs, working out what they actually need, and turning genuinely hard, ambiguous problems into a product that feels obvious once it exists.

This is a design role with a real product management edge. You'll work in tandem with our CTO to shape what we build and why, not just how it looks. You'll help set priorities, scope releases and make the calls that move the roadmap.

What you'll do

• Own the end-to-end product experience: from problem definition and research through to interaction design, high-fidelity UI and shipped product

• Bring consistency to the existing product: refine and coherently apply our design system across the app, and raise the UX and UI bar on what's already live

• Work directly with our CTO to shape the roadmap, scope releases and decide what's worth building, wearing a product manager hat alongside your design one

• Lead discovery and build proof-of-concepts for new product lines, moving from sketch to something real fast rather than over weeks

• Run your own research: get on customer calls across both the existing product and new lines, sit in on compliance reviews, and turn what you hear into clear product direction

• Establish the foundations of design at Adclear: the design system, the patterns, the craft bar and the way design works with engineering and go-to-market

• Set up design process from scratch, and help build the design team over time, with the potential to lead it

• Partner with engineering from design through implementation, staying close as things get built so the shipped product matches the intent

What you should have

• A track record that spans early-stage chaos and later-stage scaling: you joined a company at pre-seed or seed and helped take it through to Series B, or joined at Series A and scaled it through to Series C or D. You may have covered these stages across different companies rather than one.

• Genuine range: you're comfortable being dropped into zero-to-one ambiguity, but you've also proven you can take a product to its next level, not only start things from a blank page.

• You've shipped code, understand how systems work under the hood, and don't need engineering to explain why something is hard

• Prototypes in code as a default, not a last resort - You are a Figma expert and Cursor, Claude Code, or similar are already part of how you work

• High agency: comfortable operating as the sole designer under pressure, managing a heavy and varied workload, moving quickly without sacrificing quality

What we hope you have

• Exposure to fintech, regtech or another regulated space. A real plus, but not a must.

• Experience designing for non-technical operators. You've built for people who use software to get a job done, like compliance reviewers and marketers, not power users who live in the tool.

• Fluency moving between fidelities fast. Napkin sketch to clickable prototype in a day, because the fastest way to settle a debate is to make the thing real.

• Experience building or leading a design function, or a clear point of view on how you'd start building one here.

How we work

• Founders and the CTO are closely involved in the day-to-day, and design has a real seat at the table

• Design drives product direction here; it doesn't decorate decisions made elsewhere

• The pace is fast and the approach is still being built, and you're one of the people building it

• This isn't the right role if you want a fixed formula and a full team handed to you on day one

Benefits

• Competitive pay

• Meaningful equity as our founding designer

• Private healthcare and dental

• Hardware and software budget so you have the tools you want

• Monthly gym contribution

• A rare chance to define the product and the design function of a fast-growing company from scratch

How to apply

Send us a link to your portfolio together with your CV. We read every application.