UI/UX Engineer

Job Summary

The UI/UX Engineer leads product discovery, customer journey mapping, and interface design for Inkomoko's digital platforms in Nairobi or Kigali. This engineer builds enterprise Figma design systems, conducts HCD user testing with low-literacy rural clients, enforces WCAG accessibility standards across mobile/USSD/web, and collaborates with developers using Python, XML, and JavaScript.

Key Roles & Operational Responsibilities

1. Product Discovery & Customer Experience (30%)

• Human-Centered Discovery: Participate in discovery sprints with Product Managers to analyze business problems, define user personas, and map customer journeys across digital and offline touchpoints.
• Rural Field Research: Conduct contextual user research and usability testing with low-digital-literacy, rural, and refugee entrepreneurs across East Africa.
• Hypothesis Validation: Support experimentation frameworks and validate product hypotheses using qualitative research and quantitative analytics.

2. Interface Design, Prototyping & Technical Engineering (60%)

• UI/UX Design & Prototyping: Build storyboards, user flows, interactive Figma prototypes, and graphic user interfaces (menus, navigation, search modules) tailored for web, mobile, tablet, and USSD.
• Enterprise Design System: Establish and govern Inkomoko's enterprise Design System, maintaining reusable UI components, interaction patterns, typography, icons, and WCAG accessibility standards.
• Front-End Collaboration: Partner with software engineers to implement approved UI designs, leveraging working knowledge of Python, XML, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL.
• Accessibility & Low-Bandwidth UX: Engineer responsive interfaces optimized for low-bandwidth environments, ensuring usability for clients with varying literacy levels.

3. HCD Advocacy & Cross-Functional Support (10%)

• Organizational Design Capacity: Act as the internal HCD subject matter expert, coaching non-technical staff to apply design thinking to operational workflows.
• IT Roadmap Integration: Align design priorities with the broader IT Roadmap using Jira and Asana for status tracking, documentation, and sprint planning.

Foundational Capabilities & Prerequisites

Required Technical Profile & Experience

• Professional Track Record: Minimum 5+ years of experience creating user experiences and digital interfaces.
• Target Audience Familiarity: Demonstrated experience conducting user research and designing interfaces for low-digital-literacy clients in rural East African settings.
• Design Stack Mastery: Advanced proficiency in Figma (preferred), Sketch, Adobe XD, or Adobe Creative Cloud suite.
• Coding Experience (Preferred): Hands-on front-end/software coding experience, ideally matching Inkomoko's stack: Python, XML, JavaScript, PostgreSQL.
• Educational Baseline: Bachelor's degree in UX Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, Computer Science, Information Technology, Graphic Design, or a related field (Master's degree or certifications like NN/g, Google UX, or HCI are an added advantage).
• Language Proficiency: Written and spoken fluency in English plus at least one other East African language (e.g., Swahili, Kinyarwanda).

Core Competencies

• Deep empathy and commitment to Human-Centered Design (HCD).
• Systems thinking with the ability to translate complex business logic into simple user journeys.
• Strong collaboration, communication, and data-driven decision-making abilities.

What Inkomoko Offers

• High-Growth Platform: Work within the 5th fastest-growing company in Africa with a $30M loan fund impacting millions of lives.
• Competitive Remuneration: Competitive base salary + potential performance-based annual bonus.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Health insurance for self and family, staff savings and provident fund, negotiated bank rates, and generous annual leave, parental leave, and sabbatical options.

Skills Required:

• Computer / Software / It / Data