Description

Senior Product Design Engineer

Hybrid · Full time · Harwell (Oxford) / occasional London

A note from the founders

Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.

We operate in some of the most complex and high-stakes environments in the world: defence, national security, AI and robotics. The decisions we make now will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become.

You will work closely with the whole team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work in the hands of real users every day.

If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose, and by building products that genuinely matter, we would love to hear from you.

Who we are

Founded in 2019, Oxford Dynamics is a fast-growing UK frontier technology company developing both digital and physical AI systems built to operate in dynamic, mission-critical environments.

At the core of everything we build is AVIS™ (A Very Intelligent System), our orchestration platform: the intelligence layer that fuses multi-modal data, including text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds, so operators can interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. AVIS™ powers our digital decision products, such as ORION for multi-source decision-to-effect, and it powers our physical platforms, including STRIDER for CBRN operations and BARBARIAN for explosive ordnance disposal. The same brain reasons across the screen and the machine.

We work where wrong decisions can be catastrophic, partnering with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives.

The role

This is our first dedicated product design engineering hire. We hand you a loose signal, not a spec: "we think there's something here for this customer, go find it." You go and make it real, and you own it end to end, the thinking and the craft.

Three things define this role, and you need all three.

First, you find the real problem. The brief you're handed is almost always wrong, not because people are careless but because they describe the solution they can imagine, not the problem they actually have. A serving officer asks for a better map. Often the real issue is that they can't triage what matters under time pressure, and the map is a red herring. Your first job is to figure out what the thing should even be before you make it. In our world that reframe usually lives inside a constraint: the operator is wearing gloves, the decision has eight seconds, the link is degraded. Those constraints aren't obstacles to the design. They are the design problem, and often the place the real answer is hiding.

Second, you realise it with craft. Once you know what the thing is, you make it right, not just functional, and you build it yourself in production code. You have taste that operates below conscious thought, and you obsess over the details because they are what make the idea real, not because finish is a personality trait. In our world an interface is often the first thing a senior officer or a procurement lead ever sees of us, and it has to earn their trust in seconds.

Third, you get there by talking to people, not around them. There is no product manager translating for you here. You are the translation layer. You sit with an OD engineer, a serving officer, an analyst, a customer in a room, build a proof of concept, put it in front of them, and iterate on their reaction. You run that loop yourself, with internal and external stakeholders, until the thing is right.

One week it's the tactical map UI for ORION. The next it's an analyst dashboard a real analyst depends on. The next it's a customer-facing surface for AVIS or STRIDER. The brief will always be loose. Finding the real problem and realising it with craft are what make it sharp.

You'll report to the CTO and work alongside Product Leads and Business Development. You won't own the roadmap, that sits with product, but you will shape it constantly, because you're the one closest to what users actually respond to.

What you'll own

· The problem, not just the pixels: working out what a surface should actually be before designing it, then the visual and interaction language and finished quality of it (ORION, AVIS, analyst tooling).

· The full loop from loose brief to shipped artefact: reframing the real requirement, designing, building it in production code, and iterating on live feedback.

· Direct liaison with the people who use and buy what we build, internal engineers and external stakeholders alike. You don't

Senior Product Design Engineer at Oxford Dynanics