UX / UI Design Lead

Location: Hybrid working, with regular travel required across our ports and vessels or from our Gourock head office or home

Contract: Permanent, full time 37.5 hours per week, Monday – Friday

Salary: Circa £56k depending on skills and experience

Ready to shape the future of lifeline ferry services and lead impactful digital change? At CalMac, our people keep communities connected—and we’re investing in digital innovation to make those connections stronger, smarter, and more resilient.

We’re looking for an experienced UX / UI Design Lead to join our IT product team to lead the design of intuitive, accessible, and visually engaging user experiences across our technology and digital platforms. As a design leader, you will play a key role in shaping the end-to-end user journey, from initial discovery and wireframing to final visual design and usability testing.

What you’ll do as UX / UI Design Lead

As an experienced UX / UI Design Lead you will act as a bridge between users, business stakeholders, and technical teams, ensuring that user needs, business goals, and technical constraints are effectively balanced in all product designs. This is a design and hands-on role, suited to someone who is equally comfortable running workshops as they are producing design deliverables.

• Act as the UX / UI design authority, driving consistency, quality, and innovation across multiple product workstreams
• Lead workshops, design reviews, and collaborate closely with cross-functional teams throughout the agile lifecycle, promoting a user-centred design culture
• Own user research and discovery, including interviews, usability testing, and journey mapping (with travel as required)
• Translate customer insights into clear, intuitive user journeys and solutions that improve overall experience
• Champion accessibility and inclusive design (e.g., WCAG standards)
• Design and deliver visually compelling, responsive interfaces, maintaining design systems and partnering with developers to ensure high-quality implementation

What you’ll bring to the role

You will be an excellent communicator with strong facilitation skills, able to engage both technical and non-technical stakeholders effectively. A passionate user advocate, you are driven to solve real problems through thoughtful design, while remaining pragmatic and delivery-focused balancing vision with practical constraints. You thrive in collaborative, cross-functional environments and are highly organised, with a strong attention to detail and commitment to quality.

You’ll also have:

• Extensive experience in a UX / UI role
• Good understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to collaborate effectively with developers.
• Experience in using analytics and behavioural data to inform iterative improvements
• Skilled in design tools such as Figma or similar.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating successful delivery of user-centred designs across applications.
• Solid knowledge of interaction design, layout, typography, colour, and responsive design
• Experience working in Agile/product development environments
• Ability to run user research and usability testing and comfortable simplifying complex processes into clear, intuitive designs

It would be a bonus if you also had: A degree or formal training in UX / UI Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Media, or a related field and additional UX or usability certifications (e.g., Nielsen Norman, HFI)

Why join CalMac?

This is an exciting time of positive change for CalMac! As one of Scotland’s biggest employers and being awarded a 10 year CHFS3 contract, we have long term stability and investment to continue to deliver essential services to Scotland’s communities

With an excellent salary package, this is also an opportunity to join a business that is modernising, evolving and investing in its future and where you can make a visible, lasting impact in a role with real autonomy and authority.

If this sounds like the right opportunity for you, then what are you waiting for? Apply today and one of the team will be in touch!

Package

• Competitive salary • Very generous pension• Agile /Hybrid Working • Excellent training, development, and career progression • 37 days annual leave (pro-rata) • Staff travel pass for yourself, spouse/partner, and dependents

Please note, we may close this vacancy early for external applicants if we receive the required quality or quantity of applications. No agencies please