A Little Bit About Us
Saphetor's mission is to enable anyone to find, share and use the most comprehensive human genome data – and to collaborate to improve health and lives around the world. To do this we have built the VarSome suite of bioinformatic tools, the world's leading resource for analysis and interpretation of human genome variant data, with more than 6 000 citations in scientific papers, and over 60 000 registered professional users. Our customers work around the globe across academic, clinical, and industry laboratories analysing NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) data for research and diagnostic purposes.
Saphetor is a Swiss precision medicine company with offices in Lausanne (CH), Boston (USA), and Athens (GR) employing a diverse global workforce.
The Opportunity
We are looking for a talented Product Designer to join one of our engineering teams. This is a hybrid UX and front-end role. You will own the user experience of new features across the VarSome suite, define a shared visual language and component library, and help bring more consistency to our platform's UI over time.
You will work closely with product managers and engineers, turning feature intent and early concepts into clear, usable, and consistent interfaces.
You will be able to build what you design, contributing production-quality React code alongside the engineers in your team rather than working in isolation.
We thrive in a high-pressure, high-performance environment where clinical precision and rapid growth meet. While our pace is fast, it is always directed by rigorous organization and clear processes, ensuring that our commitment to quality is never compromised by our drive for speed.
Role Responsibilities
- Feature UX: Partner with product managers and engineers on every new feature, translating product intent into clear, consistent, and usable designs within the current platform.
- Design System & Component Library: Define shared standards for color, typography, spacing, and interaction patterns, and build a reusable React component library that the rest of the engineering team can adopt for new features.
- UI Modernization: Review the current state of the platform's UI, identify inconsistencies accumulated over time, and incrementally improve and unify it with the design system.
- Hands-on Implementation: Prototype and ship production-quality React code for design system components and new feature UI, working directly alongside engineers rather than handing off static designs.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with your engineering team lead, product managers, and domain experts to understand user needs and translate them into effective interfaces for complex scientific data.
The Ideal Candidate
We're looking for a designer who codes, someone who can own the UX of a feature from concept to a working interface, and who is equally comfortable in Figma (or an equivalent tool) and in a React codebase. You'll join an engineering team as the designer on the team, partnering with your team lead, product managers, and engineers to ship features end to end, and taking real ownership of how VarSome looks and feels as it evolves.
What you will bring
- Education: A Bachelor's and/or Master's degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a relevant field.
- Experience: 4–6 years of professional experience designing and shipping UX/UI for web applications, ideally including B2B or data-heavy products.
- Portfolio: A portfolio or case studies demonstrating shipped design work, including your role in the process from concept to final product.
- Design Craft: Strong interaction and visual design skills: layout, typography, color
- Design Systems: Proven experience defining and evolving design systems or component libraries.
- Front-End Skills: Working proficiency in React, with the ability to ship production-quality UI code, not only prototypes. Solid HTML/CSS/SCSS fluency.
- Inclusive Design Awareness: A practical eye for details like color contrast and colorblind-friendly palettes when choosing colors and building interfaces.
- Maintainable, team-usable design artifacts: Whatever tools you use - Figma, AI-assisted design tools, or others, the design files, component library, and documentation you produce are structured for the whole team to consume, contribute to, and evolve over time. Tool choice is yours, shared usability of the output is what matters.
- Languages: Strong command of the English language, both written and spoken.
Strongly Valued
- Prior work on scientific, clinical, healthcare, or other data-dense B2B products.
- Experience designing data-visualization-heavy interfaces (charts, tables, complex interactive components).
- Working experience with Figma or equivalent modern design tooling, including AI-assisted design tools.
- Comfort working with product teams that iterate quickly, including interpreting early mockups to understand user needs and feature intent.
- An interest in genetics and precision medicine (no prior domain knowledge required — we'll provide training).
Mindset & Key Skills
- Craft & Taste: A strong eye for visual and interaction detail, with the judgment to know when consistency matters more than novelty.
- Systems Thinking: You think in reusable components and shared standards, not one-off screens.
- Design–Engineering Fluency: You move comfortably between design tools and a React codebase, and you understand the tradeoffs of shipping real code versus static mockups.
- Pragmatic & Self-Directed: You know how to prioritize, ship incrementally, and take initiative in shaping how design works at Saphetor, with support from your team lead, product managers, and engineers along the way.
- Clear Communicator: You can explain design decisions to engineers and product managers who may not share design vocabulary, and translate their input back into concrete design choices.
While our foundation is in Athens, our talent pool is spread across Europe, with a strong culture of remote collaboration. Our team is highly experienced in distributed Agile workflows and communicates exclusively in fluent English.
Your career journey with us includes, among others:
- A position in a fascinating healthcare growth domain, at the cutting edge of technology and research.
- A competitive compensation package tailored to your unique expertise and professional background.
- A remote-first work environment (or hybrid, with 1 day/week at the office if you are based in Athens) that promotes a healthy work-life balance.
- Endless learning opportunities, while transferring new technologies from academics to clinical practice all over the world.
Saphetor is proud to be an Equal Opportunities Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and our employees, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, medical condition or disability, sexual orientation, gender expression, or marital status.
