🌊🚀 Who We Are
The Cruise Globe is building the world’s leading digital platform for cruise travellers.
Founded by a Geographer, a Naval Architect, and one of the cruise industry’s most trusted creators, we started with a simple belief: cruising deserves better digital experiences. We’re building the “Strava for cruises” - a product that lets cruisers see their exact routes and stats, capture and share their journeys, and then plan, book, and track what comes next.
In under nine months, more than 100,000 cruisers joined the platform, with over 500,000 cruises logged — all with zero marketing spend. Today, we’re building the #1 cruise app in the world, and the central digital hub for a global community of over 34 million cruise passengers.
Cruising is the fastest-growing segment in travel, and The Cruise Globe is backed by some of the most respected names in the industry. We have a rare opportunity to define an entirely new category — and we’re looking for ambitious, talented people who want to help shape a product used by millions.
🚀 The Opportunity
We’re hiring a founding Senior Product Designer to help shape The Cruise Globe. This opportunity is a highly strategic, deeply hands-on role that will define how the product looks, feels, and works for years to come.
This is a rare opportunity to take an already strong foundation and evolve it into a world-class consumer product. Design is not an afterthought here. We believe it is central to growth, engagement, and retention, and this role will sit right at the heart of product decision-making
We’re a startup, which means not everything is fully defined yet and that’s exactly why this role exists. You’ll have the autonomy to shape UX principles, establish systems, and help decide how we design and ship product, not just what gets designed.
You’ll report directly to the CEO and work closely with Product, Data, and Engineering to build a product that reimagines an outdated industry with particular focus on clarity, simplicity, and ease of use for a largely older, non-technical audience.
If you have exceptional product taste, thrive on ownership, and want your work to materially shape a growing business, this role is for you.
🧭 What You’ll Be Doing
Own the Product Experience:
Lead the end-to-end redesign of the Cruise Globe UX/UI
Ensure a cohesive, intuitive experience across content-heavy features and user journeys
Design for Real Users: Deeply understand our audience and design for discoverability, clarity, and confidence
Apply progressive disclosure and thoughtful onboarding to complex product areas
Partner Across the Business: Work closely with the Senior PM, Data Lead, and Engineers to turn big ideas into shippable product
Keep the CEO closely informed on design direction, trade-offs, and progress
Move Fast, Thoughtfully: Rapidly explore ideas through low → high fidelity → interactive prototypes
Use AI prototyping tools to test, validate, and iterate efficiently
Establish Design Foundations: Create and own a scalable UI style guide and design system
Ensure consistency, quality, and speed as the product expands
Lead Through Craft: Translate complex concepts (e.g. booking cruises, social features, and user-uploaded content) into simple, elegant interfaces
Deliver developer-ready designs in Figma that balance ambition with feasibility
Requirements
🧠 Core Requirements (Non-Negotiable)
Experience at a Senior Level in Product: Proven influence on product direction, not just execution. You have deep UX and UI craft (not visual-only or brand-led)
Extremely fluent in Figma: (components, variants, auto-layout, design systems, prototyping)
Exceptional prototyping capability:
Comfortable moving fast from rough concepts to polished, interactive prototypes
Actively uses AI prototyping tools (e.g. Figma AI, Framer, ProtoPie, Lovable, Uizard)
Highly experienced in user testing:
Can independently design tests, recruit users, run sessions, and synthesise insights
Strong instinct for what to test early vs later to reduce rework
Has shipped a consumer social product: Feeds, profiles, UGC, interactions, notifications, organic growth loops
Startup experience required: Comfortable with ambiguity, speed, trade-offs, and incomplete data
Hands-on individual contributor: This is not a design management role (though leadership and influence are expected)
Outstanding product taste: Opinionated, quality-obsessed, and confident articulating design decisions
Experience designing scalable design systems: Systems that support rapid feature growth without UX degradation
Strong collaborator with Engineering: Understands how design decisions impact build time, performance, and maintainability
Exceptional ability to simplify complexity: Turns large, abstract concepts into intuitive, human interfaces
Demonstrated experience designing for broad, non-technical consumer audiences: Comfortable designing for users who are emotionally invested in their data and memories
Quality-obsessed and iterative: Owns outcomes, not just artefacts; comfortable refining post-launch
Thrives in small, fast-moving teams: Bias toward action, learning, and iteration
🌍 Nice to Have
Strong interest in travel (especially cruising)
Experience designing for older demographics
Experience with consumer growth and engagement-led products
Experience designing across both web and mobile platforms
🎁 Why Join The Cruise Globe?
First Product Designer Hire : define the UX, systems, and design culture
True Autonomy : high trust, high impact, minimal bureaucracy
Startup Energy : less process, more ownership (and the chance to build the right process)
Direct CEO Influence : your thinking will shape the roadmap
Competitive Salary : Competitive salary + Meaningful Equity
Flexible Working: Remote-first, with 1 day per week in our London office
Holiday: 25 days + bank holidays
Pension: Auto-enrolment scheme