Product Designer

Aphex is the execution platform for major construction projects, the connected system where teams plan their upcoming work, coordinate their day-to-day, and capture the daily record. Everything draws from the same live plan.

Major contractors like Acciona, CPB Contractors, John Holland, and McConnell Dowell use Aphex to deliver projects from £50 million to multi-billion pound mega projects. We're market-leading in Australia and the United Kingdom, supporting teams building the roads, rail, tunnels, and hospitals that millions use every day.

THE ROLE

Your mission: design Diary, our production tracking and record capture product — mostly on mobile, where the capture actually happens.

The opportunity: right now, what happens on a construction site lives in scattered notes, photos, and rigid forms that nobody looks at again. Diary is our answer to that: records connected to the live plan rather than siloed, capture low-friction enough that people on site actually do it, and AI woven through so insight surfaces on its own instead of staying buried.

That's the near-term product. The longer game is bigger. We want to become the capture layer for major projects worldwide, and then build the intelligence layer on top of it — a system that can tell a project team what really happened last month and what's likely to happen next. None of that works unless capture works. Which makes the design of it a fairly interesting problem to be handed.

Most of that capture happens on mobile, out on site. The people using it aren't at desks. They're site managers in PPE, foremen sharing a tablet, engineers moving between zones with patchy connectivity and gloves on. Designing for that is a different craft from designing for desktop, and it's where the magic in this product is. It's also where the gap between our ambition and our execution is currently widest.

We want Diary to be the rare bit of construction software people are actually pleased to open. That comes down to care taken in small places: the weight of a tap, how a photo lands, what the app does when the signal drops halfway through an entry, whether the thing feels quick in the hand at the end of a twelve-hour shift. Delight isn't decoration on a product like this — someone standing in the rain will simply stop using anything that makes them work for it, and then there's no record at all. Getting that right is most of the job.

It isn't only mobile, though. We organise around products rather than platforms, so the Diary team owns capture end to end — everything recorded on site has to be reviewed, reported on and made sense of, and that happens on the web. You'd design both. Mobile is the centre of gravity and where most of your time would go; the web side is the other end of the same story rather than a sideline.

You'd join a small, senior design team, working alongside the Product Leader and PMs for Diary and a development team based in the Philippines. Diary has been piloted and refined over the last 18 months and is now live with enterprise clients getting real value from it — but most of the shape is still being decided, and you'd be deciding a lot of it.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Design capture on mobile

• Take mobile features end-to-end, from briefing through to shipped UI

• Work out the interaction patterns that hold up in the field — and the ones that don't survive contact with a wet Tuesday on site

• Design around real constraints: gloved hands, outdoor visibility, shared devices, no signal

• Work with the developers so what ships is what you designed

• Help close the quality gap between our web experience and our mobile one

Design what happens to that record on web

• Own Diary's web surfaces: reviewing, reporting, and making sense of what came off site

• Make one product feel like one product across two very different contexts

• Grow Aphex's design system as Diary grows

• Work with the Head of UX on standards and where the quality bar sits

Ship with the team

• Work day-to-day with PMs on scoping — they bring the user context, you bring the design thinking

• Get into feasibility with the developers early rather than at handover

• Review builds and catch what's off before it ships

• Get out to construction sites and watch people use this thing

YOU COULD BE A GREAT FIT FOR THIS ROLE IF

• You've got 4+ years of product design behind you and have shipped things people use every day

• You like getting deep into how a complex product works, and don't want to skate the surface

• You think in flows, states and edge cases, not just screens — and your portfolio shows it

• You've got a view on mobile. You don't need to have specialised in it, but you should have opinions about touch, offline, and what small screens do to a workflow

• You sweat the small stuff — the transitions, the empty states, the half-second that makes something feel considered rather than assembled

• You can run the whole thing: exploration, detailed design, QA

• You take being told something can't be built as the start of the conversation rather than the end of it

• You write clearly and can give and take feedback without needing a meeting for it — we're remote across UK and Australian time zones

Bonus points if you've designed for field workers, industrial users, or anyone who works with their hands; or if you've got a background in construction tech, vertical SaaS, or design systems.

You'll need to be based in the UK or Europe. You can work fully remote, or hybrid out of our London office if you'd rather have one — either suits us. If this sounds like somewhere you'd like to be — we'd love to hear from you!

WHAT WE OFFER

• Remote or hybrid, your call — fully remote from the UK or Europe, or out of our London office, working across UK and Australian time zones with WeWork access

• One annual all-expenses-paid international team offsite (we've been to Vietnam and Thailand — where to next?)

• An Aphex social budget

• £500 annual training allowance and access to our Emerging Leaders programme

• Paid parental leave

• MindFi EAP access

• Employee Referral Program

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Statement

Our company does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, or other non-merit factors. At Aphex, we believe our team should reflect the variety of perspectives in the world we build for. We've noticed that qualified candidates from underrepresented groups sometimes hesitate to apply unless they meet 100% of the listed requirements, while others might apply when meeting just 60%. If you're excited about Aphex and believe you have the core skills to succeed in this role, we encourage you to apply - even if you don't check every box in the description. Your unique perspective might be exactly what we need. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know.