Senior Product Designer

What you would be expected to do:

• Spend time in the field with Energy Officers, customers and operations teams. Watch them work. Do not rely on second-hand reports.
• Run usability tests, contextual interviews and concept tests in market.
• Turn what you learn into choice the team acts on, not decks that get filed away.

• Design the end-to-end journeys behind sales, onboarding, collections, servicing and assist.
• Map the offline steps as well as the on-screen ones. Most of our journeys start on paper or in conversation.
• Simplify flows that have grown complicated over years of feature additions.

• Take work from rough concept to production-ready screens.
• Hold a high bar on typography, spacing, ranking and legibility in bright sunlight on small screens.
• Make the interface teachable. A new agent should be productive on day one.

• Design for low-end Android devices, small screens and limited storage.
• Design for intermittent flow. Offline states, sync and failure recovery are part of the design, not an engineering afterthought.
• Design for low digital literacy and for multiple languages. Assume text will be longer once translated.

• Own our collective component library and design standards.
• Keep it in step with what engineering actually ships. A system nobody uses is worse than none.
• Document patterns so other designers and engineers can apply them without asking you.

• Build clickable prototypes to answer open questions early.
• Use AI tools to generate variants, draft copy and explore directions quickly.
• Put prototypes in front of real users and change your mind when they tell you to.

• Produce handoff-ready files, specs and states that engineers can build from without guesswork.
• Cover the unglamorous cases: empty states, errors, loading, long names, missing data, poor network.
• Review builds before release and hold the bar on implementation quality.

• Define what success looks like before the design ships: task completion, time on task, error and drop-off rates.
• Work with product and data teams to read adoption and funnel data after release.
• Go back and fix what the data says is not working.

• Work closely with product managers, engineers and market operations teams through the full product lifecycle.
• Bring evidence to design debates. Be willing to be overruled, and be willing to argue your case.
• Keep stakeholders informed at every stage.

• Travel as required to Sun King markets, including Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania and Myanmar, with regular field visits to agents and customers.

You might be a strong candidate if you have/are:

• A portfolio of shipped product work (mandatory). We want two or three cases in depth: the problem, what you tried, what you did, and what happened after launch.
• 5–7 years designing digital products, with meaningful time on mobile.
• Experience designing for users who are not like you, ideally in emerging markets, field operations, fintech or last-mile distribution.
• Comfortable being the most senior designer in the room and setting the standard.
• Able to structure and evaluate ambiguous problems.
• Clear communication in writing. You will explain design choice to people who are not designers.
• A proactive attitude and willingness to get hands-on. We are small and you will do your own research, design and testing.
• A formal design degree is welcome but not required. The portfolio matters more.

• Professional working proficiency in English (mandatory). You will work with colleagues and stakeholders across our markets in Africa and Asia.
• A local market language such as Swahili, French, Hausa, Yoruba or Luganda is a strong plus for field research.

• Expert in Figma, including components, variables, auto layout and prototyping.
• Hands-on experience building or maintaining a design system.
• Practical research skills: usability testing, contextual inquiry and field interviews, run by you rather than outsourced.
• Android design conventions and Material Design, applied with judgement rather than by default.
• Accessibility and legibility fundamentals: contrast, touch targets, text scaling, and patterns that work for low-literacy users.
• Enough data literacy to read a funnel, an adoption chart or an A/B test result and act on it.
• Comfortable using AI tools in your design workflow, for concepts, copy, research synthesis and prototypes.

• Experience designing offline-first or intermittently integrated applications.
• Front-end familiarity (HTML, CSS, or React) — enough to talk to engineers about what is expensive to build.
• Motion design or illustration.
• Service design experience covering journeys that cross online and offline steps.
• Exposure to pay-as-you-go, asset finance, microfinance or emerging-market lending.
• Hands-on experience with SQL.

What Sun King Offers

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry.
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership.

About
Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection.Sun King has built a new kind of energy utility: distributed, green, customer-centric, and affordable. We bring clean, reliable, decentralized energy directly into people’s lives — from solar kits that provide first-time energy access to multi-kilowatt systems that serve both off-grid users and grid-connected customers powering larger homes, schools, hospitals, farms, offices, and light manufacturing.Already, 25 million homes and businesses rely on Sun King for electricity supply and the appliances and services it enables: lighting, televisions, fans, refrigeration, and smartphones. Sun King combines energy generation, energy-efficient appliances, installation, and financing into one seamless offering. Think of it as a distributed utility, designed for wherever energy is needed and designed to scale with its users as incomes and energy needs grow.Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.14 a day via mobile money or cash.Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright.Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 35,000 field agents — over 1 million payments each day. To date, Sun King has extended more than $1.4 billion in PAYG loans to customers.Sun King began by powering homes and businesses with solar systems delivered through PAYG financing. Now, we’re using the same model to make smartphones and clean cooking equipment affordable: helping households connect to the digital economy and transition from wood-based fuels to modern, sustainable alternatives.Sun King employs 3,500 full-time staff in 14 countries, with specialties spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 42% of Sun King’s workforce.