Product Designer

Reporting To: Head of Product

Environment: We’re hybrid (London or Berlin). In exceptional circumstances we are able to accommodate candidates who need to work remotely. Candidates would need to have their own right to work (We cannot sponsor visas at present).

Travel: Some travel is required (conferences/team gatherings)

Opna’s Vision

Imagine a thriving, equitable planet where everyone actively participates and benefits from building projects that contribute to a low-carbon economy, safeguarding our environment, and combating climate change. At Opna, we are on a mission to make this vision a reality, becoming the world's most trusted platform for climate finance. Our goal is simple: to unlock the needed capital for every high-quality climate project that addresses climate change with speed, scale, and equity.

About the challenge and our solutions:

5200 businesses worldwide have made commitments to achieve net zero targets by 2050. However, these bold commitments are falling short, with only 7% of companies on track to fulfil their pledges. The reality is that to accelerate this pace and reach their net zero goals in a cost and time efficient manner, corporates will have to offset and inset emissions in the voluntary carbon market (“VCM”).

While the VCM is projected to become a trillion dollar industry, the prevalent mechanism in the market of purchasing carbon credits is strained by quality concerns and supply shortfalls, exacerbated by an anticipated explosion of demand in the years ahead.

To achieve their net zero commitments, an increasing number of Corporates are seizing control by directly financing the carbon projects underlying the carbon credits. However, these businesses are having a hard time mobilising their capital due to a lack of in-house expertise, high transaction costs, analogue infrastructure, and time-consuming processes. Opna's goal is to provide the platform, data, and financing innovation that unlocks this capital, bridging the gap between corporates committed to reaching net-zero and carbon projects that seek financing.

We offer a carbon projects financing platform that helps businesses discover, finance, and manage pre-assessed carbon removal and reduction projects to accelerate their journey to net zero. Through our software, we improve the discovery of carbon projects, standardise financing processes and contracts, offer digitised carbon portfolio & asset management tools, and bring down the time and cost of due diligence projects through our proprietary risk assessment framework.

We recently announced our $6.5 million seed financing round led by leading European VC Atomico and joined by our existing backers like Pale Blue Dot, My Climate Journey and several Unicorn founders.

Your Role

We are hiring our first designer to join our small product team (2 Engineers and our Head of Product). We’re building the web app used by project developers who are seeking funding for their climate projects and the corporates looking to invest in them as part of their net-zero journey.

This is a unique opportunity to help define the entire customer experience that will get us to product market fit, and then scale it. Therefore, there’s potential for this role to become permanent.

This role will give you the opportunity to:

• Take ownership: You’ll be responsible for the complete design cycle from initial discovery and user journey mapping through to the execution of final UI design details.
• Deeply understand users: You will find the best way to understand the people you’re designing for; whether that’s running user research sessions, exploring product analytics, or other methods to get to the heart of the problems you’re solving.
• Decide what’s important: Collaborate with the product team to determine the most pressing customer need and decide how to build the right thing.
• See things through: Work closely with engineers to ensure we build the thing right - troubleshoot any issues that arise and ensure that the product meets quality standards.
• Create our design ‘machine’: We’re a small team always trying to improve how we do things. Alongside product and engineering you will develop the processes that help us deliver great user experiences more efficiently.

Required Skills and Qualifications

• Seasoned designer: You have at least 4 years experience in product design and a portfolio of impactful work demonstrating how you’ve solved real problems via great product thinking, user experience and visual design.
• A self-starter - You are comfortable being the first designer in the team and going from 0 to 1 with only high-level guidance.
• Customer & outcome focused - You have a history of user research and usability testing and prioritise understanding the user and their problems over fine details.
• Design chops - You’re experienced in translating design concepts into production ready assets and have strong competence in Figma and common design tools.
• Experience designing complex products - The ability to collaborate effectively with peers across the company to distil complexity into simple experiences.
• Focused & fast-moving - Startup environments are distracting. You have the ability to block out the noise and deliver effectively.
• Growth mindset - You’re comfortable working with ambiguity in an environment where we’re all learning. You embrace experimentation and failure, and actively seek feedback on your work.

Nice to have, but not essential:

• Basic knowledge of Tailwind CSS
• Experience of the carbon markets or building products in the climate space.Our Interview Process

Our Interview Process

We’re swift at moving things along for you. We need you to meet several people (onsite/virtually) because of the responsibility that comes with this role and ensure this is right for you.

• Quick video call with our Head of Product, Will McGowan
• Project Walkthrough with Will, Shilps (our CEO) and Nico (Senior FE Engineer)
• Meet the team
• Final meet with Shilpika and Will

Cash Compensation in line with the contract

Our Team

Today, we’re a small and agile team across London, Berlin and Barcelona. Collectively we have deep experience and expertise across capital markets, carbon markets, climate finance and FinTech. We keep each other accountable. We rely on regular and open communication. We share our optimism for finding solutions to climate change. We’re gritty and actively practise empathy. We are serious about our work but don't take ourselves too seriously!

Diversity & Inclusion

We know that diversity is multifaceted and intersectional, and we want to build a company where different identities and perspectives can come together to deliver on our mission and vision. We are a venture-backed company founded and led by a woman of colour. 100% of our team today has their roots in the global south, and over half of our pre-seed investors identify as women. We speak English, Hindi, Spanish and French across our team.