Designer - AI Native

We're looking for a designer who uses AI to move dramatically faster, without sacrificing craft. You'll shape how Ember looks, feels and works, from early concepts through to shipped product.

About Ember

We're building the future of public transport — convenient, affordable, connected and zero-emission. Our goal is to make it easier and more enjoyable to get from A to B with Ember than it is with your own car.

Ember is a tech company, not a traditional bus operator. We've built a platform that coordinates our entire operation – everything from monitoring vehicles and controlling chargers to selling tickets and calculating ETAs. This allows us to use electric buses more intensively than anyone else in the world, leading to a massive reduction in emissions. It also helps us provide a much better passenger experience, with innovative features like demand-responsive stops.

We’re still tiny, with a handful of routes and 98 buses. The challenge is to scale this 50x whilst staying lean, increasing efficiency and delivering an even better product experience. We’ve recently raised a Series A from some of Europe’s leading climate VCs and are looking for mission-driven individuals who want to get on board and help take us to the next level.

The role

This is a broad design role where you'll work directly with the CTO and co-founders. We have 10 engineers and no dedicated design team, but a deep care for the craft. You'll be the person who helps move our design forward, improving the quality of everything we build. That includes everything from our website to our internal dashboards to our bus stop signage.

We're serious about AI as a product development multiplier. You'll have access to frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI and others, with generous usage limits. We expect you to use AI heavily across your workflow — exploring concepts more deeply, generating and iterating on visual assets, prototyping interactions, and contributing directly to the codebase. We also expect you to actively experiment with new tools and techniques as the landscape evolves.

Being AI-native isn't a substitute for being good. Your eye, your taste and your judgement are what make the difference between AI-generated output and a genuinely great product. AI helps you explore more options faster, but you're the one who knows which option is right.

You don't need to be an engineer, but we think AI has massively improved the ability of designers to develop and demonstrate ideas that are closer to shipping. You care enough about the final product to get your hands dirty, whether that's tweaking CSS, building a web app mockup, adjusting component behaviour or building out a design system in code.

What you might work on

You’ll work on a mixture of greenfield and brownfield projects. That could include:

• Creating a brand new design system and component library, and migrating our existing website to it.

• Redesigning the booking experience for passengers connecting between multiple routes, from research and wireframes through to shipped UI.

• Designing a self-serve checkout for coach hire, where customers build and modify their own journeys and stops.

• Working with our operations team to understand their daily workflow, then designing tools that save them hours.

• Establishing how Ember looks and feels across every touchpoint — digital, physical, internal.

• Fixing the 50 small UX details that collectively make a product feel unfinished.

Diversity and equality

At Ember, we support diversity across our team and customers. We work to ensure every employee feels respected and able to give their best, whether temporary, part-time or full-time. We’re happy to offer flexible working patterns where they make sense, are compassionate when it comes to time off and offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave. Read more about our approach in our Equal Opportunities Policy.

What’s on offer

You'll receive a salary of £40,000–£100,000 per annum, depending on your experience and skills, plus share options. You'll also have access to frontier AI models with generous usage limits. You'll be expected to work from our office in central Edinburgh most days — we value in-person communication — but there's flexibility around the odd day from home.

How do I apply?

Send your CV and a short note on why this interests you. Share examples of your work — shipped products, design systems, side projects, case studies.

Who we're looking for

You should have a desire to get involved early in Ember's growth story, with a real opportunity to make your mark. Your approach to work and thinking is more important to us than specific industry experience. The following should sound a lot like you:

• Good taste, high standards. You have a strong feel for what makes a product elegant — layout, typography, spacing, interaction, hierarchy. You notice when something is slightly off, and it bothers you enough to fix it.

• AI-native. You use AI to explore more, iterate faster, and produce more than a traditional designer could alone. You're the kind of person who tries a new tool the day it comes out. You form your own opinions about what works and what doesn't. You share what you learn with others.

• Ship, don’t just design. You care about what the user actually experiences, not just what the prototype looks like. You're willing to get into the codebase to make sure what ships matches your intent — or to improve it beyond what you originally designed.

• Empathetic problem-solver. You want to understand the person using what you build. You talk to users, watch how they struggle, and let that inform what you prioritise. You design for the messy parts too, from error states to edge cases and loading screens.

• Cross-disciplinary. You're curious about how things work under the hood. You want to know about data models, API constraints and engineering trade-offs. Not because you need to build them, but because it makes your designs better and more implementable.

• Direct and collaborative. You say what you think, you challenge ideas constructively, and you're comfortable being challenged in return. You can work with founders who are opinionated and move fast.

• Motivated by mission. You're excited by what we're doing and the chance to shape a product that's visible in the real world. Millions of journeys are made with our buses every year and your work will directly affect each passenger’s experience.