Senior Product Designer / UX
CyberOwl is a fast-growing maritime cybersecurity company helping shipowners and critical infrastructure operators secure remote and distributed assets. Our technology provides near real-time insight into onboard IT and OT environments, supported by managed security and specialist advisory services.
We are 70+ Owls across Europe and Asia, representing more than 13 nationalities and 20 languages, with a shared ambition to shape the future of maritime cybersecurity.
The role
The Role:
We are looking for a Senior Product Designer who can both lead the research and design the interface. You will own how we learn from the people who use Medulla, our maritime cybersecurity monitoring platform, and turn that learning into interfaces that ship.
Medulla serves fleet security and IT teams, ship managers, our own Security Operations Centre analysts and crew onboard vessels. These users are rarely available for neatly scheduled research, so you must be as comfortable extracting evidence from recorded calls, product telemetry and internal experts as you are running moderated sessions.
The product is dense. A customer may operate 150 vessels, each with dozens of systems generating a continuous stream of alerts, vulnerabilities and compliance evidence. Almost everything on screen could justify its place—which is exactly the problem.
Our job is to reduce what users have to look at, not simply surface more of it. Designing well here means deciding what earns attention, what is deliberately held back and how users move from a fleet-level view to the individual asset that matters.
As our sole researcher and designer, you will set the method, standard and cadence, work independently across squads, and be equally credible presenting findings and handing engineering a buildable flow.
Much of your work will happen before a build decision. You will take an ambiguous proposition, identify the question that matters, run the smallest experiment capable of answering it and recommend whether we stop, iterate or take the idea into production.
How we work with AI:
We expect AI to be a normal part of your research and design workflow. If AI-assisted tooling helps you move from a finding to a prototype, specification or testable interface faster, we expect you to use it.
Your judgement should be spent on the flow, hierarchy, states, edge cases and trade-offs. You must recognise when AI output is merely plausible rather than correct and verify AI-assisted synthesis against source evidence.
Ideally, you already work this way. We will also consider someone earlier in their AI practice who shows strong judgement about where it creates leverage, needs checking or should be discarded.
What you’ll do:
- Own the research agenda for Medulla, agreeing priorities with the Head of Product and deciding what should be studied, how and in what order.
- Run mixed-method research, including moderated sessions with fleet teams, ship managers and vessel crews; observation of SOC workflows; and analysis of recorded customer conversations.
- Use product telemetry to understand what users actually do, target qualitative research and define what should be measured before a release ships.
- Test comprehension as well as usability. When Medulla presents risk, coverage or compliance information, misunderstanding it is a product failure.
- Design flows that work at fleet scale, deciding what is shown by default, what is held back and how detail is revealed across fleet, vessel, system and asset levels.
- Translate evidence into user flows, prototypes, interaction designs and UI specifications that engineering can build without repeated clarification.
- Design for real operational conditions, treating empty, partial, stale and error states as primary cases rather than exceptions.
- Maintain consistency across Medulla by contributing to shared UI patterns and components.
- Build a research repository so evidence remains reusable and traceable.
- Work with the Product Owner to turn decisions into testable backlog items with clear intent and acceptance criteria.
- Collaborate directly with development squads on interaction details, edge cases and feasibility trade-offs, supporting QA where needed to validate design intent.
- Lead pre-build experiments by defining the hypothesis, test and kill-or-productionise criteria before the experiment begins.
- Validate shipped work and establish whether it produced the behaviour or outcome it was designed to create.
The design challenges:
Data density is central to this role. You will need to be confident with:
- Prioritisation and ranking: deciding what earns space on screen and defending what has been left off.
- Progressive disclosure and aggregation: moving between fleet, vessel, system and asset levels without losing context or hiding the case that matters.
- Tables, lists and comparisons: using sorting, grouping, saved views and strong defaults rather than relying on filters.
- Data visualisation: knowing when a chart adds understanding and when a number or table is the better answer.
- Design at scale: ensuring the same view works with 20 records and 2,000, including performance-aware choices such as pagination and virtualisation.
- Operational states: designing for missing, delayed, incomplete and conflicting information as normal conditions in a monitoring platform.
What we’re looking for:
Essential
- A genuinely mixed research and design skill set. You can run the research and carry the outcome through to something an engineer can build.
- The ability to reach a buildable design quickly, including through AI-assisted tools. Craft shows up in the interaction, states and edge cases—not simply the polish of the file.
- Experience designing complex, data-heavy interfaces that remain usable when the information no longer fits comfortably on one screen.
- An opportunistic approach to research access. You can build a credible evidence picture from imperfect sources when formal research panels are unavailable.
- Strong evidence discipline. You separate observation from inference, state sample sizes and limitations, and do not overclaim from a few conversations.
- The confidence to be the organisation’s sole researcher and designer, setting the method and standard without close supervision.
- The ability to explain and defend a design position with engineers, commercial stakeholders and customers—and change it when the evidence changes.
- Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to frame the question that matters and scope the smallest experiment that can resolve it.
- Strong written communication. Your findings and decisions must remain understandable months later.
- Hands-on experience in Agile delivery environments, designing to sprint cadence rather than through long, isolated design cycles.
- Practical AI fluency, paired with the judgement to verify or reject generated output.
- A strong learner’s mindset. Maritime cybersecurity is unfamiliar to most designers, and you will need to build credibility quickly.
Desirable
- Experience with monitoring, observability, analytics or other operational products where information hierarchy and prioritisation carry the value.
- Experience designing products with a managed-service component, where a human team sits between the software and customer outcome.
- Experience designing for users who speak English as a second language or work in operational or low-connectivity environments.
- Experience working remotely across international teams.
How you’ll work with others:
You will agree the research agenda with the Head of Product, partner with the Product Owner and work directly with development squads. Our SOC and Customer Success teams are both users and research channels, while Marketing and Account Management will help coordinate customer access.
You must be comfortable working across squads and time zones and willing to travel occasionally for customer research, including vessel and customer-site visits.
What we value
At CyberOwl, we live by six values: Bold, Empathy, Ownership, Why, Learn and Spirited. We will ask you to demonstrate how you apply them in your work.
Why join us?
CyberOwl combines the agility and entrepreneurial spirit of a high-growth technology company with the backing and global reach of DNV, one of the maritime industry’s most respected names.
You will have genuine ownership of research and design across a technically demanding product used in real operational environments. This is a high-autonomy individual contributor role where your decisions will visibly shape the product and how maritime organisations understand and manage cyber risk.
You will also have the opportunity to build the research and design practice—not inherit somebody else’s process—and see your work move from evidence to experiment to shipped product.