Head of Design

About this role

🚀 We’re on a mission to make real estate transactions smarter, faster, and friction-free.

🏢 Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, yet the legal processes and tools behind it remain slow, manual, and underinvested. Lawyers must review dense documents line by line and piece together information across silos, all while clients demand faster, more transparent due diligence.

🤖 That's where we come in. Orbital Copilot is the AI assistant built exclusively for commercial real estate law. Developed with former practicing real estate lawyers, it accelerates complex due diligence by up to 70% while delivering legal-grade precision.

💰 We’ve just raised a $60m Series B to accelerate our UK/US expansion.

🤝 We're trusted by leading firms like Goodwin and BCLP to remove the busywork so legal teams can focus on what they do best: applying sharp legal judgment, delivering standout client service, and getting deals over the line faster.

💡 Working at Orbital means joining a team that's reimagining how real estate transactions get done - moving fast, working collaboratively, and giving people the ownership to 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…