Head of Design

Department: Product

Location: London

Employment Type: FullTime

Orbital is the AI platform for real estate legal work.

Real estate shapes the world around us: our homes, our workplaces and our cultural landmarks. It’s the infrastructure that powers everyday life and is the world's largest asset class. Yet behind every single deal, real estate and legal teams work hard to navigate decades-old complexity; manually connecting documents, hidden obligations, geo-spatial context, and multiple parties into a path forward. We connect the legal and physical record, so that path is clearer than ever before. Our mission is to make real estate transactions faster, clearer, and less manual.

Here, you'll be part of changing how the deals behind the largest asset class get transacted, and will help shape the future of real estate.

A bit about us:

🚀 We’re building at the forefront of AI technology, without losing the deeply human expertise our clients depend on.

🏢 Orbital is built with former practising real estate lawyers and 250+ years of combined legal expertise. We're purpose-built for the complexity of real estate: accelerating due diligence, drafting and negotiation, and deal coordination with legal-grade precision.

💰 We've just raised a $60m Series B, led by Brighton Park Capital, to accelerate our global expansion – $75m raised to date.

🤝 We're trusted by 5,000+ real estate professionals, spanning UK Magic Circle and US Am Law 100 firms, to household names like M&S. Leading firms like BCLP, Orrick, Goodwin, Womble Bond Dickinson and Clifford Chance rely on Orbital to remove the busywork, freeing legal and real estate teams to focus on sharp judgment, standout client service, and closing deals faster.

💡 Working at Orbital means joining a bold, ambitious team, with the trust to take ownership and make a real impact from day one.

The role

You will report directly to the CTO and work alongside engineering, product, legal engineering and AI from the start. Your direct team is small today, three designers, and you will shape how it grows from here.

Your starting point is not a design backlog handed to you in advance. It is the product strategy, growth ambition, and AI-first operating model, and you will use that context to set the design agenda.

Orbital is at an inflection point. The product is live and trusted by some of the most demanding real estate legal professionals in the world. The challenge now is not building something from scratch but making it significantly better: cleaner, faster, and genuinely easier to trust. As the product scales across the UK and US, the design function needs to grow with it, and you will be the person who builds it.

What you'll do

Lead from the product.

Your first team is the product engineering leadership team. You will be part of product, commercial, and strategic conversations, bringing a strategic design perspective to business challenges rather than representing the design function in isolation. From there, you will form your own view on where the product experience is constraining growth, where the interface is creating friction for users, and what needs to change. You will help the leadership team pressure-test product decisions against user reality, spot where information architecture, interaction patterns, or visual clarity are becoming bottlenecks, and ensure that how we design is aligned with where the business is heading.

Set the design agenda from product context.

You will not be given a predefined project list. You will assess what you learn from the product, the users, and the business and set the design priorities from there. That means making sure areas like information architecture, interaction design, design systems, user research, and AI interface patterns are pointed at the right problems and prioritised accordingly. A major part of the brief is translating current product realities into a sharper design mandate and challenging existing assumptions when the evidence demands it.

Define what AI-native design looks like here.

The hardest design problems at Orbital are not aesthetic. They are epistemic. How do you help a real estate lawyer trust an AI output enough to put their name to it? How do you present the reasoning behind a 50-document analysis in a way that a partner can review in 20 minutes? How do you make agentic behaviour feel controllable to a professional who is accountable for the outcome? You will set the standard for how Orbital answers those questions, shape the interaction patterns that distinguish our product from everything else in the market, and hold the wider team accountable for the quality of the experience we ship.

Build the design function.

You will be the consistent presence the design team anchors around. You will invest in their growth, develop clear ownership within the function, and be accountable for the team's development over time, not just its immediate output. Over time you will shape a high-leverage design function that combines strong craft, deep user understanding, and a genuine instinct for where AI changes the rules.

Requirements

The must-haves

• Significant experience leading product design at a senior level at a scaling B2B tech company. You bring real depth across the design discipline. That foundation is essential, but what sets you apart is the ability to operate beyond it.

• A track record of sitting at the product leadership table and influencing business decisions, not just delivering a design agenda within one.

• Experience scaling a design function through a high-growth phase, with the judgment to know what process and structure matters at each stage and what slows you down.

• You have designed AI-native products. Not tools with AI bolted on. You have worked through the real problems: explainability, trust, agentic UX, confidence signals. You have opinions formed from real experience.

• You have designed for expert professional users, people who know their domain better than any designer ever will, and you understand how to design for that dynamic without condescending or oversimplifying.

• Strong commercial instincts. You understand how product design affects adoption, retention, and revenue, and you can connect design decisions to business outcomes.

• The ability to translate product context into a design strategy and challenge existing priorities when the evidence demands it.

• Experience leading through a design team, setting direction and standards without owning every deliverable.

And a few nice-to-haves

• Direct experience of a Series B to Series C growth journey.

• Built a design function from an early-stage base rather than inherited one.

• Familiarity with legal tech, fintech, compliance tech or another domain where precision and professional accountability shape every design decision.

• Experience building or significantly evolving a design system that improved team velocity at scale.

Why you'll love it here

• You will join a company at a genuine inflection point, with real influence at the product engineering leadership table from day one.

• You will shape the design function rather than inherit one, with room to build it around craft, research, and AI-first thinking.

• The design problems here are some of the most interesting and challenging in the market.

• You will be part of a collaborative, highly ambitious team where the standard is high and the ownership is real.

Benefits 🌟

🧑 💻 We believe in flexibility, but we're also big on in-person collaboration. This role is based in our London office with an expectation of multiple days in the office per week. It's about being present when it matters, and balancing autonomy with commitment.

🏢 Equity options in a fast-growing startup

🌴 25 days holiday plus bank holidays

📚 Personal development budget and learning opportunities

🍔 Free lunch on Wednesdays and Deliveroo budget for late nights

🚲 Cycle-to-work scheme

📚 A bias toward experimentation, rapid learning, and iterating quickly based on real feedback

We're in the process of building an inclusive, welcoming culture where everyone feels seen and valued. Expect regular team off-sites, shared lunches, and social events, with something for everyone.

🔒 Security is everyone’s responsibility at Orbital. We ask all team members to follow our security policies, complete regular awareness training, and handle sensitive data with care in line with ISO 27001 standards. Spot something unusual? Reporting risks or incidents quickly helps us maintain the strong culture of security and compliance we all depend on.

💡 At Orbital, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We especially welcome applications from people who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, or if the right role isn’t listed yet, we’d still love to hear from you.

💰 This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on several factors, which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and business requirements.

Everyone who works with Orbital goes through background screening before they start. It's part of how we keep Orbital secure, for the people who work here and for the client information we're trusted with.