Lead Product Designer (Chat)

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

NB: We are unable to sponsor visas for this role or offer non-UK remote working, unfortunately. You should be based in the UK and have the right to work here.

About Cleo

Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we empower people to build a life beyond their next paycheck, building a beloved AI that enables you to forge your own path toward financial well-being.

Backed by some of the most well-known investors in tech, we’ve reached millions of people to support them throughout their financial lives, from their first paycheck to their first home and beyond. We're hitting headlines too. This year, Forbes named us as one of their Next Billion Dollar Startups, and we were crowned the 'Hottest Tech Scaleup' at the Europas.

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.

On the frontier of design

We're moving through uncharted territory with brand new design challenges around conversation, UI, brand, TOV and applied machine learning AI that don’t have much precedent yet. We’re using all that to help people improve their financial health, solving money problems that make a very real and tangible difference to our users.

The role

Cleo’s Chat pillar owns the strategy and execution for the end-to-end experience of the personalized, AI-enabled financial coach at the heart of our product that supports our users to make smart money decisions every day.

As the Lead Product Designer, you’ll take on a pivotal role in our AI Money Pro squad, responsible for helping Cleo to understand our user’s current financial situation, creating goals to reach a desired financial situation, and personalized and engaging coaching that helps users form habits and behaviours to get there.

What you’ll be doing: 

• Drive the design vision for Chat: Lead the strategic direction for Cleo’s Chat experiences, crafting interactions that make money management feel intuitive, engaging, and personalized.
• Own and shape AI-driven interactions: Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to create AI-powered features that are intelligent, relevant, and human whilst continuously adapting to meet the evolving needs of our users.
• Product ownership and roadmap partnership: Partner proactively with the PM to shape and influence the product roadmap, ensuring that design decisions are well-aligned with Cleo’s strategic goals.
• Hypothesis driven process: Leverage insights from user research and data to guide every aspect of Chat design, ensuring the user’s voice is central to our decisions. Facilitate design sprints, user testing, and iterative improvements that are grounded in real feedback.
• Cross-functional leadership: Build strong relationships with product, engineering, and data science teams to create a shared vision for the Chat experience. Lead alignment across departments, ensuring seamless integration of design strategies.
• Design leadership: Provide guidance and mentorship to designers within the AI Money Pro squad, fostering growth and a strong sense of ownership. Set a high bar for design quality, encouraging experimentation and collaboration to raise the team’s impact.

About you:

• Proven Design lead experience: You’ll ideally have 6+ years of experience as a design lead across multiple mobile apps and consumer product-centric startups or tech companies
• Exceptional design craft: You’re equally comfortable at the high and granular levels, you bring strong design execution to life while championing a “work backwards” approach to anchor design solutions in user needs and insights.
• Design vision and strategy: You can develop and communicate a compelling design vision that inspires cross-functional team members and aligns with the Chat pillar and business goals. 
• Design thinking & user-centric: You cultivate a culture of design thinking, guiding teams in empathy-building, ideation, and rapid prototyping to explore and refine solutions that solve complex problems elegantly and intuitively.
• Ownership and collaborative: You’re someone who can be a collaborative thought partner to the squad's Product and Engineering leads to proactively drive strategy, roadmap alignment, and product decisions.
• Stakeholder engagement: You’re adept at communicating design rationales and aligning cross-functional teams, and exec level stakeholders to ensure that everyone is working towards a shared goal.
• Coaching others: You’re invested in helping designers grow, fostering a culture of curiosity, support, and shared ownership across the team.

Additional preferred experience:

• Previous experience designing consumer facing AI or Chat focused products

How long will the process take? 

We aim to move as fast as possible. Usually 2-3 weeks is enough time for us all to get to know each other.

• Step 1: An initial phone call with a member of our Talent Team to learn more about your experience and why you want to work at Cleo
• Step 2: A craft interview with one of our design team to assess your mobile app design execution and impact as well as get to know you
• Step 3: A case study with a design manager to present a more in-depth, end-to-end product you’ve successfully shipped
• Step 4: A final Cleo values interview with two cross-functional peers from our Product, Data, Growth or Engineering teams

 What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity). You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here: This role is level PD4 and we can pay between £82,539 - £106,905 pa depending on experience
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms like Sofina, Balderton & EQT Ventures.
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility: We treat you as humans first, employees second. Because we can’t fight for the world’s financial health, if we’re not healthy ourselves. This means all the usual perks but it also means flexibility. We take pride in being a flexible workplace that trusts our Cleople to deliver their best work, giving you the autonomy to structure your day around morning drop-offs to school or daily dog walks.
• Hybrid-first: Join our hybrid-first team, where we blend the best of both remote and in-office work. We expect our team members to be in our London office 1-2 times a week. On Thursdays, we buy you lunch but you can come to the office on whichever days work best for you!

Other benefits;

• Generous pay increases for high-performers and high-growth team members
• Equity top-ups for team members getting promoted
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo)
• Check out our new benefits package here: https://web.meetcleo.com/blog/big-benefits-energy-the-latest-cleo-employee-benefits
• 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
• Company-wide performance reviews every 8 months e.g every 2 terms, in line with our termly cycles (Jan-April, May-Aug, Sept-Dec):
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
• Enhanced parental leave
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
• We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
• Online mental health support via Spill
• And many more!