Design Engineer

About Artificial

Help shape the future of specialty insurance

At Artificial, we’re building the next generation of technology for the specialty (re)insurance market. Our mission is to transform how brokers and carriers operate in complex markets by removing operational barriers and enabling smarter, faster decision-making.

We use modern technology to solve real challenges for some of the world’s leading brokers and insurers. By automating the repetitive and structuring the complex, we help our partners unlock new opportunities for innovation and growth.

You’ll be joining a collaborative team that values curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning. We work in an environment where ideas are heard, support is built-in, and outcomes matter. Everyone here has the chance to make a tangible impact on our products, our customers, and the industry.

We've just raised $45M (£33M) in Series B funding from lead investor CommerzVentures, new investor Move Capital, as well as all existing shareholders. This investment round gives us the room to grow with confidence, continue to innovate, and ensure that Artificial remains the first choice for brokers and carriers seeking a smarter way to trade digitally.

Join us, and take the chance to be a part of something that will change the landscape of insurance for generations.

About the Experience Team

We are hiring in parallel for multiple overlapping roles in the Experience team, including Product Designers . Apply for whichever role you think suits you best—we can always change your track once we start the process.

Here’s an intro video from Jon Lay, Chief Experience Officer (requires cookies):

The Experience Team owns the browser experience of Artificial’s platform. Although the lines between us are intentionally very blurred, we are basically a team of:

• Product Designers , who work directly with customers and lead on UX, research, and product thinking.

• Design Engineers , who own the design-to-browser layer and bring the experience to life in code.

• Product Engineers , who handle deeper back-of-the-frontend (and some backend) work and collaborate with platform teams on scalability.

Here’s a little flavour of how we operate and what we care about:

• Design and experience as the differentiator. There’s genuine backing for design across the business—we are an active voice in product and commercial strategy, not just the people who put a lick of paint on the work at the end. Shipping an outstanding user experience is key to how we win as a business.

• Travel and ship. We aim to minimise handovers between roles wherever possible. Our whole team ships code, so you’ll often find yourself going end-to-end: receiving a piece of customer feedback, prototyping potential solutions, discussing with the team, then raising and merging a PR.

• Remote and async first. Our HQ is in London, but we’ve built the team to be remote-first, with a heavy emphasis on creating space for deep, uninterrupted work and rigorous thinking.

• Using AI smartly. Despite what our name might suggest, Artificial is a technology company, not an AI wrapper business. But as a team , we’re continually learning, sharing, and pushing each other to stay on the cutting edge of the changes ripping through our industry. If you’re not excited about AI and learning how you can use it to be more effective (and when not to use it), this may not be the team for you.

• Hard work; sustainable pace. We’re a Series B scale-up building complex, mission-critical technology for demanding enterprise customers. We take sustainable pace seriously—no 996 culture here! But there’s an inherent intensity to working in this environment: we deal with high ambiguity, hard problems, high stakes and high standards. We’re looking for people who are drawn to that challenge.

• Prototype in code. Although we still use Figma for sketches, annotations and explorations, our primary communication medium for the last 12+ months as a team has been the coded prototype , often accompanied by an explainer video and written note to debate as a team. Rather than debating what might work, we heavily lean towards building a prototype to see whether neat ideas can stand up to reality.

About the role

As a Design Engineer at Artificial, you should be as comfortable participating in a design critique as you are reviewing a pull request.

You will:

• Own the front of the frontend — the component system, page layouts, CSS architecture, visual quality, animation, and micro-interaction detail across the Artificial Platform. Implementation quality is your responsibility.

• Work on Bets — we use an adapted Shape Up methodology, alternating between major new feature development (“Bets”) and ongoing iterative improvements.

• Work from design problems, not just specs — you engage in the design problem-solving process, contributing to figuring out what to build, not just building what you’re handed.

• Build working prototypes in React (and, using LLMs, occasional vibed Haskell backend code) that explore interactions, test assumptions, and communicate solutions to the team.

• Define how features work, not just how they look — writing RFCs and feature specifications complete enough for Product Engineers to build upon, covering behaviour, edge cases, and system interactions.

• Expand and maintain our React-based design system — components, primitives, design tokens, and the documentation that makes them usable.

• Stay close to customer insight — through Forward Deployed Engineers, internal recordings, occasional customer calls and conversations with teammates who have direct customer relationships.

• Collaborate with Product Engineers — work together on features, providing feedback and direction, polishing their work in code. And when the frontend engineering work gets heavier, hand it over to them to extend your work.

• Collaborate with other designers — participate in design crits and pairing sessions to bring a strong implementation perspective to conversations about design decisions and directions (and propose your own ideas, too!).

You won’t:

• Need to lead the definition of design vision and direction—for that, you’ll have Product Designers to collaborate with.

• Need to lead the delivery of enterprise-ready back-of-the-frontend work (e.g. state management, API integration or data architecture)—for that, you’ll have Product Engineers to collaborate with.

About you

Essential:

• 8+ years working as a designer, design engineer, or a combination of both — with meaningful time spent on both sides of the design-code boundary.

• Strong CSS and interaction design capabilities. You care deeply about the implementation layer and how things feel in active use.

• Strong in TypeScript (and React). You can contribute to (and own, where necessary) production-quality frontend code, and you understand how your design decisions affect engineering feasibility and maintainability.

• Strong communicator — written and verbal. You advocate for your ideas with clarity and confidence, and you’re genuinely receptive to feedback. You write well enough that your specs and decisions hold up without you in the room to explain them.

• Thrives with autonomy. You manage your own priorities, communicate proactively, and don’t need someone to tell you what to do next. You’re comfortable navigating uncertainty and balancing competing demands.

Desirable:

• Experience in complex domains (insurtech, fintech, healthcare, legal, etc), developer tools or B2B SaaS products.

• Experience working at startups or scale-ups.

• Comfortable working from incomplete information. You make partial decisions well and are explicit about what you’re leaving open.

• Willingness to visit our London office occasionally. This is a big plus, though this is a remote role, so it’s not a dealbreaker if you’re not in a position to do this.

Benefits

• Private medical insurance

• Income protection insurance

• Life insurance of 4 * base salary

• On-site gym and shower facilities

• Enhanced maternity and paternity pay

• Team social events and company parties

• Salary exchange on pension and nursery fees

• Access to Maji, the financial wellbeing platform

• Company stock options managed through Ledgy

• Milestone Birthday Bonus and a Life Events leave policy

• Generous holiday allowance of 28 days plus national holidays

• Home office and equipment allowance, and a company MacBook

• Learning allowance and leave to attend conferences or take exams

• YuLife employee benefits, including EAP and bereavement helplines

• For each new hire, we plant a tree through our partnership with Ecologi Action

• The best coffee machine in London, handmade in Italy and imported just for us!

  We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to building a team that reflects the diverse communities around us. If there’s anything you need to make the hiring process more accessible, just let us know—we’re happy to make adjustments. You’re also welcome to share your preferred pronouns with us at any point.

  Think you don’t meet every requirement? Please apply anyway. We value potential as much as experience, and we know that raw talent counts.

  As part of our hiring process, we’ll carry out some background checks. These may include a criminal record check, reviewing your credit history, speaking with previous employers and confirming your academic qualifications.