Design is core to how Zinc helps organisations build trust and transparency, and we're growing the team to match our ambitions.
Why we're hiring:
- We've got more strategic work than capacity right now, and that's holding back some of our best ideas
- This is a new seat at the table, built to give someone real room to lead on discovery and execution rather than just keep the trains running ️
- First up: a long-overdue rethink of the candidate experience, one of our biggest opportunities for impact
How you'll work:
- You'll work closely with Product & Engineering as genuine partners.
- At Zinc, designers don't just polish what's already been decided, you'll help define the problem, shape the solution, and see it through.
Role Summary ️️
- You'll take ownership of strategic features and product areas end to end, the kind of work that shapes where Zinc goes next
- Expect real ambiguity, your job is to bring clarity to it, not just execute against a finished brief
- This is meaty, foundational work rather than incremental polish, so there's plenty of room to make your mark
- You'll run the full process yourself: research, discovery, prototyping, through to shipped product
- Do this well and you'll be driving outcomes that genuinely move the needle for the business
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Lead Strategic Design Projects: Own the end-to-end design process for key initiatives, from discovery and user research to wireframing, prototyping, and high-fidelity visual design.
- Tackle Ambiguous Problems: Break down complex, undefined problem spaces into clear, actionable design projects, creating clarity for yourself and the wider product team.
- Champion the User: Plan and conduct user research (interviews, usability testing) to gather insights, validate hypotheses, and advocate for user needs throughout development. At Zinc, research is a core design skill, not a handoff.
- Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work in a tight-knit partnership with product and engineering to define requirements, explore solutions, and deliver features that are valuable, usable, and feasible.
- Drive Key Initiatives: Take a leading design role on critical projects, including improving the candidate experience, from concept to launch.
- Deliver High-Quality Craft: Produce user flows, interactive prototypes, and pixel-perfect UI designs that communicate design intent and adhere to our evolving design system.
- Communicate Design Rationale: Clearly articulate your decisions and the "why" behind them to a variety of stakeholders, ensuring alignment and buy-in.
- Be Close to the Customer: Stay connected to customer-facing teams and real user feedback, championing user-centred thinking in how the team prioritises and decides.
End-to-End Product Design ️
Context: You can independently manage the entire design lifecycle for a complex feature, from problem definition and research through to final UI and developer handoff.
Problem Framing & Discovery
Context: You're skilled at navigating ambiguity, breaking down complex strategic problems into manageable parts, and leading design discovery to find the right user problems to solve.
User Research & Synthesis
Context: You can plan and execute qualitative research independently and synthesise findings into actionable insights that inform product strategy and design decisions, not just feature details.
Interaction & Visual Design Craft
Context: You have a strong command of interaction design principles and can produce high-fidelity, visually polished mockups and prototypes in Figma or similar tools, and can articulate the rationale behind your decisions.
Workshop Facilitation & Presentation
Context: You're comfortable leading collaborative sessions and presenting ideas with clarity, and can align a room of mixed disciplines around a direction.
Strategic Product Thinking
Context: You connect design to product strategy rather than just executing on briefs; you help shape them, asking the harder questions and spotting wider opportunities.
Preferred skills:
- Experience working in a high-growth startup environment.
- Experience designing for B2B or B2B2C SaaS applications.
- Experience contributing to or working with established design systems - knowing when to follow the pattern and when to question it.
- Comfort using quantitative and qualitative product data to inform decisions and sharpen design outcomes.
- Active curiosity about AI and emerging tools, backed by genuine experimentation rather than surface-level interest.
- A basic understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and their constraints.
Experience Required:
- 3-5 years of experience in a product design or UX/UI role.
- A portfolio of work is required for consideration, demonstrating user research, problem-solving, and high-quality visual and interaction design.
- Proven track record of shipping products in a collaborative, agile environment.
Key Traits:
- High Autonomy: A self-starter who thrives on ownership, able to take a high-level goal and drive it forward with minimal oversight, proactively unblocking yourself and your team. Crucial for owning new, undefined strategic areas.
- Comfort with Ambiguity: You see a loosely defined problem as an opportunity to create clarity, and are energised by turning strategic ambiguity into a concrete plan.
- Pragmatism: You balance ambition with feasibility, knowing when to push for a perfect solution and when to make smart trade-offs to ship value iteratively.
- Empathy: You understand customers and teammates deeply, and it shows in your work and how you show up for the people around you.
- Collaborative Communicator: You excel at communicating design rationale to stakeholders from different disciplines, actively listen, and build strong partnerships with product managers and engineers.
- Curiosity: You always ask why, digging into customer needs and continuously looking for better ways to solve problems.
Zinc offers a chance to work on a product that brings a fresh perspective on data ownership in hiring
- 24 days holiday + Bank Holidays + your birthday off
- £1200 annual benefits allowance (ThanksBen, from month 2)
- Early finish Fridays (16:00)
- Yearly company retreat abroad ✈️
- 30 days to Work from anywhere
- Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, and Adoption Leave (2 months full pay, then statutory)
- Statutory pension with NEST (3% employer, 5% employee)
- Zinc shares, issued through the EMI Scheme
- Unlimited access to MoreHappi coaching
- Company socials, quarterly team socials Free Monday lunches
- Nursery workplace benefit scheme (Yellownest)
- Option to lease an electric car through Electric Car Scheme
Celebrated Zinc anniversaries
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Who we are
Zinc builds automated reference and background checking tools designed to improve candidate experience and set new industry standards. Founded in 2017 by a team with extensive HRTech experience, Zinc is an early-stage startup rapidly growing as it redefines efficiency, transparency, and fairness in background checks.
Read more about our story here: https://zincwork.com/mission
We're a culture first company, by this we don't just mean an active calendar of both company and team organised events (which we do have ),Zinc's culture is defined by a respectful and autonomous approach to all employees, fostering support for new ideas, promoting a flexible work environment, and operating within a flat structure. While socials, lunches, and events enhance the experience, the core of Zinc's culture drives employees to embrace innovation, share successes, and feel motivated about the company's future.
We recently redefined our company values:
The pieces that make Zinc: Pragmatic, Integrity, Empathy, Collaborate, Empowered, Speed.
