Director of Product Design

Description

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.

Role Purpose

As Product Design Director, you will lead the Product Design Group. The job has two halves and both matter. Effective operator, and design leader. You will build a team capable of producing category-defining member experiences, set the standard for what good looks like within it and hold that team responsible for designing products people will love: remarkable, distinct, and unmistakably Neko. Product strategy and roadmap sit with Product. The product design vision, and the craft behind it, are yours.

You own the team, the quality bar and the design output.

You'll report to the Head of Creative and work closely with Product, Engineering and the other creative disciplines across Architecture and Brand Creative.

What You'll Deliver in the First 6–12 Months

Continue to build the team's design leadership layer.

Define what exceptional product design looks like at Neko, establish the principles and review

mechanisms that uphold it, and materially raise the quality bar.

Establish a way of working with Product and Engineering where design sits inside the build, not

upstream of it.

Develop the team's strongest designers into its next leaders.

Ship experiences that set Neko apart. Design quality that is visibly distinct, and unmistakably ours.

Minimum Qualifications

Built products from scratch. You have taken products from 0 to 1 at consumer-facing companies, and your record is not mainly incremental improvement of something established.

Exceptional taste and craft, and a real love for the work itself. You still design. You have a clear point of view on what good looks like and can articulate it well enough that a team holds itself to it. This is a role for someone who lives in the design tools, not in documents about design.

A proven team-builder. You have hired, developed and retained specialist design talent at every level, including senior domain leadership, and people have done their best work under you.

A credible peer to Product and Engineering. You hold your own with both, and you work in the

overlap where design and engineering blur, thinking in prototypes and built things rather than specifications and handovers.

A strong operator. You build the team and the conditions for it to do its best work, and you clear the path in front of 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 Creative. Build in close partnership with the Head of Creative and senior leadership from day one.

Build something new. This is a greenfield opportunity for the team you'll lead.

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.

Hiring Process

Candidates progress from application and structured screening through thoughtfully designed interviews

culminating in a formal offer and final pre-employment checks before joining the team.