Senior Product Designer Lead OpenFn Automation Platform

Job description

Type: Part-time OR Full-time/ Freelance
Location: Remote

Important: This role is for someone working within European or African Timezones

This is a highly hands-on leadership role as a solo designer where the successful candidate will be expected to both drive the design process and execute all design work independently, requiring a clear strategic vision coupled with strong implementation capabilities.

About Open Function Group

We’re a diverse, (22 staff in 11 countries!) helping governments and NGOs worldwide automate workflows and scale their impact.

Our core product, , is an open-source automation platform (and recognized ) that streamlines data exchange and repetitive tasks.

OpenFn powers mission-critical workflows like hospital record sharing, vaccine supply chain delivery, and emergency crisis response.

We’re a fully-remote, lean team that uses AI, automation, and cutting-edge technologies to drive efficiency where it matters most; we do not make marginal improvements to already comfortable lives.

Rather we're driving the digital transformation of public services across Africa, Asia, and beyond—helping our partners deliver more efficient, resilient systems for millions of people.

The Role

As a Senior UX/UI Designer Lead at OpenFn, you’ll be building an intelligent automation platform that helps tech teams in governments and NGOs in 40+ countries help the world’s most disadvantaged people live better lives.

You’re technical, and appreciate the importance of “developer experience”.

You’ll take inspiration from tools like Cursor, Github, n8n, and Tray.ai.

At the same time, you understand that collaboration between technical and non-technical people is what allows an organization to effectively use a complex, powerful technology to produce real world value—generating birth certificates for children in Ghana, analyzing wildlife protection data from national parks across Southeast Asia, optimizing the national vaccine cold chain in Nigeria.

Frankly, OpenFn is unfinished.

It’s packed with features, but lacks the elegant information architecture that makes usage intuitive for both technical and non-technical users.

Building an incredibly powerful AI powered automation platform is just the start, you’ll help us finish the job by simplifying it.

Your work will not be limited to a web application.

We take a holistic approach to product at OpenFn, and a designer here must be able to zoom out to consider and contribute to everything from our to our to our .

Those interfaces are used by IT teams and consultants, and we have our own in-house Services team that has delivered dozens of end-to-end implementations on the platform.

You'll be the design bridge between our Services team and our Product Engineering team.

This dual-facing position requires a user-centric designer and can translate real customer pain points into actionable design solutions that are built alongside engineers.

We don’t hand off pixel-perfect Figmas.

At OpenFn, design is a conversation between users and engineers and you’re the facilitator.

You guide both sides towards solutions that delight users while being practically feasible for engineers to deliver on tight budgets and timelines.

Your unique value will be:

• Customer voice translation: Converting Services team customer insights into specific design requirements and user stories
• Cross-team design strategy: Ensuring design decisions serve both immediate customer needs (Services) and long-term platform evolution (Product)
• User advocacy: Championing customer experience improvements that emerge from real-world usage patterns
• Design consistency: Maintaining unified user experience across customer-facing tools and core platform features
  

This role is perfect for a designer who wants their work to have an immediate, measurable impact on user success while contributing to a platform that scales globally.

Requirements

What You’ll Do

Visual Communication Leadership

• Own OpenFn's complete visual journey: Lead visual design across our entire user experience—from marketing website and advertising through platform onboarding, daily workflow interfaces, CLI tools, and developer documentation—ensuring seamless, intuitive design language throughout
• Cross-property user experience: Design cohesive user journeys that flow naturally from initial discovery (marketing) through technical implementation (platform/CLI) to ongoing usage (documentation/support)
• Cross-property brand consistency: Ensure cohesive visual identity and user experience across platform, marketing site, and documentation—maintaining design system standards across all customer touchpoints
  

Design System Leadership

• Architect scalable design systems: Lead the development and maintenance of our design system, creating reusable component libraries and design tokens that support both platform development and customer-specific implementations
• Drive design system adoption: Document design patterns, usage guidelines, and implementation specs to accelerate sprint velocity and reduce design debt across teams
  

Agile Integration & Cross-Team Collaboration

• Own sprint design delivery: Participate in sprint planning sessions, provide accurate design effort estimates, and commit to deliverables that align with engineering capacity and product roadmap priorities
• Transform requirements into design: Translate product requirements and customer feedback into comprehensive user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and production-ready designs
• Refine user stories for development: Collaborate with product and engineering teams to break down complex epics into actionable, designable user stories with clear acceptance criteria and definition-of-done
• Facilitate design decisions: Lead design discussions across Services and Product teams using GitHub issues for tracking, Slack for real-time collaboration, and Figma for visual alignment and developer handoffs
  

Technical Collaboration & Implementation

• Bridge design-to-code gaps: Provide implementable design specifications, review code for design fidelity, and troubleshoot UI/UX issues during development
  

What We’re Looking For

Design Experience

• 4+ years designing complex B2B/SaaS platforms with portfolio showcasing workflow tools, automation interfaces, or developer-focused products
• Dual-audience design expertise: Proven ability to create interfaces serving both technical users (developers, integrators) and non-technical users (project managers, analysts)
• Design system leadership: 3+ years building and scaling design systems including component libraries, design tokens, and governance processes
  

Technical & Agile Skills

• Sprint-based delivery: experience in agile environments with demonstrated ability to estimate design effort and deliver within sprint cycles
• Developer tool understanding: Familiarity with API integrations, workflow builders, or automation platforms—bonus for JSON, webhooks, or integration concepts
  

Collaboration & Communication

• Cross-functional facilitation: Experience translating between technical and business stakeholders across multiple teams (services, product, engineering)
• User research integration: Ability to conduct lightweight usability testing and synthesize customer feedback into actionable design improvements within agile constraints
• Async communication excellence: Strong written communication skills for GitHub issues, Slack collaboration, and Figma handoffs
  

Tools & Process

• Expert Figma proficiency with advanced features (auto-layout, components, variants, dev handoff)
• GitHub comfort for design asset management, issue tracking, and cross-team collaboration
• Documentation discipline: Track record creating clear design specs and component guidelines that enable team independence
  

Bonus Points

• Experience building B2B applications whose primary users are technical consulting shops (Accenture, Thoughtworks, etc.)
• Experience working with Digital Public Goods, Digital Public Infrastructure, GovTech, or on open-source projects.
• Deep understanding of data integration tools or data interoperability in the health or humanitarian sectors.

Benefits

Why Join Us?

• Work on a product with global impact in health, payments, and social services.
• Join a mission-driven team with a modern async/remote culture.
• Have the freedom to shape user experiences that directly improve real-world service delivery.
  

Required Skill Profession

Art And Design Workers