Junior Product Designer

Junior Product Designer

Candide is an AI-first tech company based at Babylonstoren in the Cape Winelands, with a second office in the UK. We build the digital products behind some of the world's most celebrated hospitality and lifestyle estates – Babylonstoren, The Newt in Somerset, Vignamaggio, and others. Our office sits on the Babylonstoren estate itself, surrounded by gardens, mountains, and farm-to-table food. We design, build and maintain eCommerce platforms, mobile apps, admissions and membership systems, booking engines, and brochure websites. Our team is small but high-impact, working across a portfolio of luxury brands that people genuinely love.

Role Description

As Junior Product Designer, you'll work across all user-facing aspects of Candide's digital products. Through research, you'll build a deeper understanding of the cohorts our products serve and spot opportunities to simplify and elevate the experience. We want you designing things that are truly intuitive, a delight to use, and held to the standard our estates are known for.

What We're Looking For

• 1–3 years of experience in product design, UI/UX, or a closely related field
• Fluent in Afrikaans and English
• A portfolio that shows your thinking, not just your final screens – we want to see the problem, your process, and the trade-offs you made along the way
• Confident working in Figma day-to-day
• A sharp eye for detail and an instinct for when something looks and feels right
• Curiosity about how AI tools can speed up or improve parts of the design process
• Collaborative and enjoys working as part of a team
• Eager to learn and continuously improve
• Good communicator, able to ask questions and raise issues early
• Comfortable presenting and defending your decisions to a cross-functional team

Key Responsibilities

• Working directly with the design team, product owners and engineers to help build our products and services
• Understanding the needs of our customers, bringing these to life for your teammates and using them to inform your work
• Ensuring consistency in the digital expression of our sister estate brands
• Designing new user journeys and iterating on existing ones to constantly improve our products and services
• Refining interfaces and interactions to create slick, user friendly experiences across our products
• Identifying quick wins or opportunities for driving conversion rates
• Using and following our multi-brand design system consistently across your work, flagging gaps or inconsistencies as you find them
• Moving quickly, testing ideas at scale and iterating
• Embracing AI-first tools across the design process – from research to handoff – and helping us find faster, better ways of working

Perks & Benefits

• Daily catered lunch
• Flexible working hours — core hours are 9am to 3pm
• Choice of equipment (most of us use Apple)
• Generous training and conference budget
• 30% discount at Babylonstoren — online shop, hotel, spa, and farm shops
• Arranged admission to Babylonstoren for you, and immediate family
• Access to Babylonstoren's recreation centre, gym, swimming pool, and studios
• Quarterly socials and team building