The posting
MISSION
Neko is redefining what prevention means, from treating illness when it arrives, to sustaining health before it's ever at risk. Our mission: make data-driven, preventative care accessible to more people, before symptoms appear.
In a single, non-invasive visit under an hour, proprietary technology and direct clinical care combine to deliver personalised, actionable insights. It's a team that thinks in 10x, not 10%. Every role here plays a part in building a world where prevention is the norm, and where your work genuinely helps people live longer, healthier lives.
THE DESIGN CHALLENGE
Neko's product is not a screen. It is a member journey that runs from booking through a full-body scan to a clinical conversation and everything that follows. Digital, clinical and physical, held together as one experience.
The hardest and most interesting part is the data. A Neko scan produces more information about a person's health than most people will see in a lifetime, and it lands with someone who is not a clinician. Making that intuitive, trustworthy and genuinely actionable is the central design problem here, and nobody has solved it yet.
Our answer starts from one principle: the power to act stays in the member's hands. We design experiences that inspire people to engage with their health, and put the power to act on it in their hands, rather than deciding for them. Every designer here, at every level, advocates for that agency.
ROLE PURPOSE
As a Principal Product Designer, you shape the function, not only your own work. You identify and frame the highest-leverage problems across an area and, increasingly, across Neko. You create concepts that shift product direction, and you build shared direction across teams and disciplines so that good decisions get made without your constant involvement.
You lead other designers, including Leads: you set direction for them, grow the next Area and Pod Leads, and may manage managers as the team grows. You will be Area Lead from day one for a named part of the experience, one responsible person with the power to make design decisions in it, and you will form and lead a pod around it when the signals say so.
You can still deliver exceptional work personally, and you will carry the most conceptual big bets. Increasingly, though, you create leverage through direction, critique, principles and patterns that raise the quality of everyone's work. You also carry the product design vision work alongside the Head of Creative. You'll report to the Product Design Director.
HOW WE SHOW UP
Beyond level and craft, these are the traits we expect from every designer on the team. They are how we work, not a checklist for the interview.
- Taste & judgment. Strong intuition for what makes a great, distinctive experience, and the courage to push past the safe or expected. Judgement to know what to prioritise, cut, or change direction on.
- Conviction. Converges breadth of exploration into a clear, decision-ready point of view, often by asking the right question before asserting an answer, and drives decisions forward once direction is sufficiently clear.
- Craft in execution. Cares about hierarchy, pacing, wording, transitions and states, the small details that make an experience feel coherent.
- Systems thinking. Designs reusable patterns that work across conditions, markets, moments and products, and surfaces them without being asked.
- Storytelling. Finds the emotional layer that sparks human interaction, turning a clinical fact into something a person feels connected to, not just something they are told.
- AI native. Explores and pushes AI tools as part of the design process, open to how they can speed up prototyping, documentation and exploration.
- User empowerment. Creates human experiences that tap into emotion and make people want to engage, then makes the path to act genuinely usable. Protects member agency: the decision and the action stay in the member's hands, not just the information.
WHAT YOU'LL DELIVER IN THE FIRST 6–12 MONTHS
- Own Medical OS + Hardware from day one, as the design counterpart to the product area lead. Set the direction, hold coherence across the clinical tools, raise the quality bar and make the key design decisions.
- Shape how doctors see and follow a member over time. Move the clinical experience from disconnected tools toward one connected system, so clinicians work from a whole picture rather than piecing it together.
- Design the shift from manual to software. Much of the clinical pathway runs on people today; you frame and prototype the workflows that take that load off doctors and let them spend their time where it has clinical value.
- Carry the conceptual big bets yourself, 0 to 1 and hands on. The next generation of clinical tools will be AI-assisted workflows rather than screens; you design the first of them, with the pod building alongside you.
- Shape the roadmap with the product area lead. Concept a quarter ahead so the work in one quarter informs the plan for the next, and sit in roadmap decisions as a peer.
- Make clinical design impact measurable. Define how we know a tool improved doctor efficiency, clinical quality or member outcomes, and use that evidence to influence direction with Product, Engineering and Medical.
- Grow the pod. Mentor the designers in it, frame work for others to build, and have a clear view by mid-year of what the team needs next as clinical engineering grows.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience. Ten or more years designing digital products, with several years leading designers and shaping how a design team works. We level on demonstrated capability, so treat the range as a guide.
- Service design and information architecture as core strengths. Has changed the underlying service, not only the interface: mapped a complex workflow across people, systems and sites, made dense clinical information readable and decided what should exist before deciding how it looks.
- Has taken an ambiguous space from 0 to 1. Framed what to build where the problem itself was unclear, concepted the direction, and shipped the first version hands on. A record of defining a product area, not only improving one.
- Comfortable with AI-assisted and decision-support workflows. Has designed, or is credibly ready to design, products where the system proposes and the clinician decides: automation, recommendations, agentic workflows, with the trust and oversight questions that come with them.
- Has led designers and grown them. Managed or mentored designers including senior ones, set direction for a group, and formed a team around an area. Appetite for people leadership, not only tolerance of it.
- A credible peer to Medical, Product and Engineering leadership. Holds their own in clinical and roadmap conversations, works in the overlap where design and engineering blur, and has operated in a regulated environment, translating constraints from Regulatory, Quality and Legal both ways without losing the ambition.
- Exceptional taste and craft, and still designs. A clear point of view on what good looks like, articulated well enough that a team holds itself to it.
WHY NEKO
- Work on a mission that matters. Preventive health has the potential to fundamentally change how long and how well people live.
- A senior role in Product Design. Build in close partnership with the Product Design Director and the Head of Creative from day one.
- Build something new. An area of your own, and the pod that grows around it.
- Exceptional colleagues. We hire people who are rigorous, curious, and deeply committed to doing things right.
- Competitive compensation and equity.
ABOUT TITLES AT NEKO
We use a simplified internal title framework that prioritises clarity over hierarchy, so internal titles may differ from market-facing role titles. Scope, impact and level of the role are fully aligned and will be clearly discussed throughout the process.
Internally this role sits at Level 4 (Lead) in Neko's level framework. For calibration, Principal here is roughly Staff to Senior Staff at large technology companies.
HIRING PROCESS
Candidates progress from application and structured screening through thoughtfully designed interviews, including a portfolio review and a practical design session, culminating in a formal offer and final pre-employment checks before joining the team.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & INCLUSION STATEMENT
Neko Health is committed to inclusive hiring and member-first care. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and encourage you to request reasonable adjustments to support your application.
