What Aphex does
Aphex is the execution platform for major construction projects—the connected system where teams plan their upcoming work, coordinate their day-to-day activities and capture the daily record. Everything draws from the same live plan.
Major contractors such as Acciona, CPB Contractors, John Holland and McConnell Dowell use Aphex to deliver projects ranging from £50 million developments to multibillion-pound megaprojects. We're a market leader in Australia and the United Kingdom, supporting teams building the roads, railways, tunnels and hospitals that millions use every day.
The role
Your mission: Design Diary, our production-tracking and record-capture product—mostly on mobile, where the capture actually happens.
The opportunity: Right now, what happens on a construction site lives in scattered notes, photos and rigid forms that nobody looks at again. Diary is our answer: records connected to the live plan rather than siloed, capture that is low-friction enough for people on site to actually do it, and AI woven throughout so insights surface on their own instead of staying buried.
That's the near-term product. The longer game is bigger. We want to become the capture layer for major projects worldwide and then build the intelligence layer on top of it—a system that can tell a project team what really happened last month and what's likely to happen next. None of that works unless capture works, which makes its design a fairly interesting problem to be handed.
Most of that capture happens on mobile, out on site. The people using it aren't at desks. They're site managers in PPE, foremen sharing a tablet and engineers moving between zones with patchy connectivity and gloves on. Designing for that is a different craft from designing for desktop, and it's where the magic in this product is. It's also where the gap between our ambition and execution is currently widest.
We want Diary to be the rare piece of construction software people are actually pleased to open. That comes down to the care taken in small places: the weight of a tap, how a photo lands, what the app does when the signal drops halfway through an entry and whether it feels quick in the hand at the end of a 12-hour shift. Delight isn't decoration on a product like this—someone standing in the rain will simply stop using anything that makes them work for it, and then there's no record at all. Getting that right is most of the job.
It isn't only mobile, though. We organise around products rather than platforms, so the Diary team owns capture end to end. Everything recorded on site has to be reviewed, reported on and made sense of, and that happens on the web. You'd design both. Mobile is the centre of gravity and where most of your time would go; the web side is the other end of the same story rather than a sideline.
You'd join a small, senior design team, working alongside the Product Leader, the PMs for Diary and a development team based in the Philippines. Diary has been piloted and refined over the last 18 months and is now live with enterprise clients getting real value from it—but most of its shape is still being decided, and you'd be deciding a lot of it.
What you'll do
Design capture on mobile
Take mobile features end to end, from briefing through to shipped UI
Work out the interaction patterns that hold up in the field—and those that don't survive contact with a wet Tuesday on site
Design around real constraints: gloved hands, outdoor visibility, shared devices and no signal
Work with the developers so what ships is what you designed
Help close the quality gap between our web and mobile experiences
Design what happens to that record on the web
Own Diary's web surfaces: reviewing, reporting and making sense of what came off site
Make one product feel like one product across two very different contexts
Grow Aphex's design system as Diary grows
Work with the Head of UX on standards and where the quality bar sits
Ship with the team
Work day to day with PMs on scoping—they bring the user context; you bring the design thinking
Explore feasibility with developers early rather than waiting until handover
Review builds and catch what's off before they ship
Visit construction sites and watch people use the product
You could be a great fit for this role if
You've got more than four years of product design experience and have shipped products that people use every day
You like getting deep into how a complex product works and don't want to skate the surface
You think in flows, states and edge cases, not just screens—and your portfolio shows it
You've got a view on mobile design. You don't need to have specialised in it, but you should have opinions about touch interactions, offline use and what small screens do to a workflow
You sweat the small stuff—the transitions, empty states and half-second details that make something feel considered rather than assembled
You can run the whole process: exploration, detailed design and QA
You take being told something can't be built as the start of the conversation rather than the end
You write clearly and can give and receive feedback without needing a meeting—we're remote across UK and Australian time zones
Bonus points: You've designed for field workers, industrial users or anyone who works with their hands, or you have a background in construction technology, vertical SaaS or design systems.
You'll need to be based in the UK or Europe. You can work fully remotely or in a hybrid arrangement from our London office—either suits us. If this sounds like somewhere you'd like to be, we'd love to hear from you!
What we offer
Remote or hybrid working—fully remote from the UK or Europe or based in our London office—across UK and Australian time zones, with WeWork access
One annual, all-expenses-paid international team offsite—we've been to Vietnam and Thailand, but where will we go next?
An Aphex social budget
A £500 annual training allowance and access to our Emerging Leaders programme
Paid parental leave
MindFi Employee Assistance Programme access
Employee referral programme
Equal employment opportunity (EEO) statement
Our company does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, colour, religion, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability or other non-merit factors. At Aphex, we believe our team should reflect the variety of perspectives in the world we build for. We've noticed that qualified candidates from underrepresented groups sometimes hesitate to apply unless they meet 100% of the listed requirements, while others might apply when meeting just 60%. If you're excited about Aphex and believe you have the core skills to succeed in this role, we encourage you to apply—even if you don't check every box in the description. Your unique perspective might be exactly what we need. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know.