Senior Product Designer
Senior Product Designer based in Nairobi or Lagos who owns end-to-end design (research, flows, visual design, prototyping, handoff) for Sun King's apps used by field agents, customers, and staff. Work targets low-end Android devices, offline/patchy-network conditions, and emerging-market users, with an AI-first workflow built around Figma and a shared design system.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Africa
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Design
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Portfolio of shipped product work with 2-3 in-depth case studies (mandatory)
- 5-7 years designing digital products, with meaningful time on mobile
- Experience designing for users who are not like you, ideally in emerging markets, field operations, fintech or last-mile distribution
- Comfortable being the most senior designer in the room and setting the standard
- Able to structure and evaluate ambiguous problems
- Clear communication in writing for non-designers
- Proactive, hands-on attitude (does own research, design and testing)
- Professional working proficiency in English (mandatory)
- Expert in Figma, including components, variables, auto layout and prototyping
- Hands-on experience building or maintaining a design system
- Practical research skills: usability testing, contextual inquiry and field interviews run personally
- Android design conventions and Material Design applied with judgement
- Accessibility and legibility fundamentals: contrast, touch targets, text scaling, low-literacy patterns
- Data literacy to read funnels, adoption charts or A/B test results and act on them
- Comfortable using AI tools in the design workflow for concepts, copy, research synthesis and prototypes
- Willingness to travel to Sun King markets (Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Myanmar) with regular field visits
Nice to have
- Formal design degree
- Local market language such as Swahili, French, Hausa, Yoruba or Luganda
- Experience designing offline-first or intermittently integrated applications
- Front-end familiarity (HTML, CSS, or React)
- Motion design or illustration
- Service design experience covering journeys crossing online and offline steps
- Exposure to pay-as-you-go, asset finance, microfinance or emerging-market lending
- Hands-on experience with SQL
Full description
Job Location: Nairobi, Kenya or Lagos, Nigeria
**About the role:
The Senior Product Designer (UX Designer),** based in Nairobi or Lagos. You will report to the Head of Product, Enterprise Products.
You will own the experience of the products our customers, field agents and our staff teams use every day. That covers the apps our Energy Officers use to sell, onboard and service customers. It also covers the products our customers use to buy, pay for and manage their energy. It covers the tools our staff uses to manage the inventory, sales, collections, incentives, etc every day. And it covers the design system that holds all of it.
The people you design for are not like you. Many are first-time smartphone users. They work outdoors, on low-end Android devices, on patchy networks, often in their second or third language. A design succeeds here when an agent can close a sale in a village at the end of a long day. It is not judged by how the screen looks in a portfolio.
We also want an AI-first approach to design. You reach for AI to explore concepts, generate variants and pressure-test copy. You prototype before writing a specification. You ask “can AI do this better” first, not as an afterthought.
This role covers design end to end. Research, flows, interaction design, visual design, prototyping and handoff. We expect all of it done the AI-first way: faster, sharper, and built to scale.
1. Research with the people who actually use our products
- Spend time in the field with Energy Officers, customers and operations teams. Watch them work. Do not rely on second-hand reports.
- Run usability tests, contextual interviews and concept tests in market.
- Turn what you learn into choice the team acts on, not decks that get filed away.
2. Flows and interaction design
- Design the end-to-end journeys behind sales, onboarding, collections, servicing and assist.
- Map the offline steps as well as the on-screen ones. Most of our journeys start on paper or in conversation.
- Simplify flows that have grown complicated over years of feature additions.
3. Visual design and craft
- Take work from rough concept to production-ready screens.
- Hold a high bar on typography, spacing, ranking and legibility in bright sunlight on small screens.
- Make the interface teachable. A new agent should be productive on day one.
4. Design for real constraints
- Design for low-end Android devices, small screens and limited storage.
- Design for intermittent flow. Offline states, sync and failure recovery are part of the design, not an engineering afterthought.