Product Design Engineer
Sona
What we’re doing
80% of the global workforce doesn’t sit behind a desk - think retail assistants, waiters, bartenders, care assistants, nurses and so on. But up until now only 1% of funding has gone into building tools for them.
As a desk based worker it’s hard to imagine working without tools like Slack, Trello and Gmail, but for much of the deskless workforce, that’s the current state of play.
The only way to find out what shifts you’re working is to look at a print out taped to the break room wall. Changes to shifts are scribbled on the printout, photographed then sent to WhatsApp groups. Managers spend hours calling and texting trying and often not succeeding to fill overtime shifts. Payslips are sent in the post or accessed via web 1.0 portals and holiday is requested either in-person or through clunky legacy kiosks. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The result is a dissatisfied workforce, soaring rates of attrition and tens of billions wasted in lost productivity, re-hiring and unnecessary agency spend.
This same workforce is accustomed to the very best in user experience, WhatsApp for messaging, Monzo for banking and AirBnB for holidays.
So where is the work app?
That’s what we’re building at Sona. The single app that will deliver a best in class user experience for deskless workers to manage their entire work life.
We’re still early on in our journey. We have an experienced founding team in place, supported by some incredible investors, and are looking to make our first product design hire.
About the role
You’ll be working as part of a small, tightly knit team to design and deliver the very first version of the Sona app.
You’ll be speaking to customers, understanding their priorities and pain points then taking these learnings and using them to design delightful user experiences.
You’ll also contribute to the realisation of the designs into code by working with our engineers on our React Native and Phoenix applications (if you’ve never worked with these platforms before, don’t worry, we’ll get you up to speed).
You’ll play a key role in shaping not just the first version of the Sona app, but the ongoing roadmap as we iterate to build out a consistent, polished app that covers every aspect of deskless work.
About you
You’re a bit of a polymath, you’re equally at home chatting to users and designing beautiful user experiences in Figma or Sketch as you are contributing to the creation of those experiences in code.
Everybody’s different, but a lot of the following probably applies to you:
- You’ve substantial experience working with a typical UX/ UI design stack, e.g. things like Figma / Adobe XD / Zeppelin / Sketch etc
- You’ve built out or contributed code to products created using a modern startup stack, e.g. React / Rails / Phoenix / Express etc
- You think about product design as being as much about overall user journeys as it is about aesthetics
- You care a lot about the little details that make things feel polished, what does a screen look like when it’s empty? What if somebody’s name is longer than average? How do you tell somebody about invalid data they’ve entered?
- You like talking to the customers you’re designing for and are comfortable building clickable prototypes and running user tests with them on potential users
- You generally think the best of people, always looks for the most generous possible interpretation of what someone says and enjoy chatting to users to understand what makes them tick and how we can serve them better
How we work
- Everything starts with talking to customers. We like everyone in the company to regularly join either sales calls with new prospects or catch ups with existing customers
- We’re a small team with a strong preference for lightweight, asynchronous processes. Within product we work in sprints with periodic retrospectives
- We’re a fully remote organisation with people in the UK, Spain and Italy. We like to all get together in one place a few times a year
Our stack
- Our mobile app is written in React Native & Typescript and backed by GraphQL
- Our backend and web application is written in Phoenix with Liveview for web front ends which allows us to deliver beautiful, reactive front ends with up to two thirds less code than a traditional SPA. This allows us to ship exceptionally rapidly
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Employee share option scheme
- New M1 Macbook + equipment grant for home office
- Co-working stipend
- 4.5 day standard working week (take your half day out when it suits you!
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