Lead Designer

Lead Designer • Location: Paris, France (hybrid, three days a week in the office) • Team: UX • Salary: €63,000 - €75,000 • Contract: Permanent • Reporting To: Head of UX Please note: This role requires an existing right to work in France. We can’t offer visa sponsorship, but we review sponsorship role by role, so keep an eye on our careers site for future opportunities. About Kaluza Kaluza is the Energy Intelligence Platform, turning energy complexity into seamless coordination. We help energy companies overcome today’s challenges while accelerating the shift to a clean, electrified future. Our platform orchestrates millions of real-time decisions across homes, devices, markets and grids. By combining predictive algorithms with human-centred design, Kaluza makes clean energy dependable, affordable and adaptive to everyday life. With teams across Europe, Asia and Australia, and a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, we power leading companies including OVO, AGL and ENGIE, as well as innovators like Volvo and Volkswagen. What you’ll do • Own UX strategy for our EU programme end to end, with real judgement over what to prioritise and how, as the market and the team's shape itself still takes form • Partner directly with Product, Engineering, and Data on the ground locally, including wider teams and client-side engineers,bringing user needs into decisions from the start, not added on afterward • Use our established research methods to bring real insight into your own design work, and feed what you learn locally back into the wider team's shared understanding • Lead and grow two designers based in London, building one genuinely connected team across EU and the UK from early on • Shape how local work becomes part of our shared platform and design system, so what you build here compounds for every client after, not just this one • Build directly in code where useful, using AI-assisted tools to prototype or ship small front-end changes yourself, closing the gap between design and delivery • Go beyond representing UX, be an active voice in the trade-offs between PMs and Design, holding the right balance between client-specific needs and our global approach, including directly with clients and stakeholders in workshops, showcases, and pre-sales conversations across the EU market • Help define what design leadership looks like across a genuinely distributed function, UK, EU, and Australia, while it's still being built What you’ll bring Ideally you’ll have/be • A track record owning UX strategy and delivery end to end for a complex, multi-stakeholder product, ideally in a regulated or operationally complex industry • Experience designing in B2B or B2B2C environments, for professional, repeat users rather than casual consumers • Direct experience managing or mentoring other designers, comfortable leading a small team while still doing hands-on design work yourself • Experience working from, and contributing back to, a shared platform or design system, not just consuming one • Comfort working close to code, confident using AI-assisted development tools (such as Claude Code) to go from design to a working interface yourself • A genuine appetite for building something from an early stage, comfortable with ambiguity that comes with shaping a team and a market presence, not just operating inside one already settled Where you'll work We offer flexible working, with an expectation of 3 days a week in the office. This gives us the best of both: real time together to collaborate and build relationships, with the flexibility to work in the way that suits you best the rest of the week. Our Values • Play to win: Collective pride in decarbonising energy at scale. • Solve the real problem: Cutting through comple