This is Cradle

Proteins are the molecular machines of life, used for many therapeutic, diagnostic, chemical, agricultural and food applications. Designing and optimizing proteins takes a lot of expert knowledge and manual effort, through the use of custom computational and biological tools.

Machine learning is revolutionizing this space, by enabling high-fidelity protein models. At Cradle, we offer a software platform for AI-guided discovery and optimization of proteins, so that biologists can design proteins faster and at scale. We are already used by clients across biopharma, biotech, agri-tech, food-tech, and academia.

We're an experienced team of just over 100 people. We've built many successful products before and have enough funding for multiple years of runway. We are distributed across three offices in Amsterdam, Boston, and Zurich, alongside a few remote colleagues.

We offer our employees a very competitive salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits and career progression opportunities.

About the role

Cradle is building something that didn't exist a few years ago: a product that lets biologists use machine learning to design better proteins without becoming machine learning engineers themselves. That one sentence hides an enormous amount of complexity. Under the hood, a scientist is preparing data, configuring ML optimisation workflows, running experiments across rounds, and making sense of the results, work that until recently needed a dedicated computational team. Our job is to make all of that feel like one coherent product rather than a pile of tools bolted together.

We sit at an unusual intersection: SaaS, machine learning, and molecular biology. The design challenge is to take one of the most complex workflows in modern science and make it legible to a domain expert who has a very high bar for clarity and very little patience for anything that gets in the way.

As Product Designer, you'll design features end-to-end, from a rough product problem to shipped screens, working closely with our platform engineers to make sure what ships matches what was designed.

What you'll do

Design features end-to-end: Take individual features from a rough product problem through research, conceptualization, implementation and iteration. You own the whole arc, not just the prototype.
Own our design system: Maintain and evolve our design system, building new components when a new pattern warrants it, so it stays clean and reliable for the whole team to build from.
Care about the edge cases: Define states, error paths, and content variability explicitly, so what you hand off is unambiguous to build, not just pretty in the happy path.
Build alongside Engineering: Stay with your work through implementation alongside our platform engineers, closing the gap between what was specified and what actually lands in the product.
Stay close to the science: Work with user research to understand scientists' real workflows and pain points, and let that shape what you design.

Requirements

The best people we've hired didn't match a checklist. Here's what matters most for this role, but if you bring most of it and are curious about the rest, we'd love to hear from you:

A portfolio showing designs that held up once engineering built them, not just polished mockups.
Experience designing complex, data-dense product surfaces, and turning a complex domain into a user flow that makes sense to someone new to it.
Experience building and maintaining a design system, with the judgment to know when "clean and consistent" beats "perfectly systematic."
Deep fluency in Figma: auto-layout, variables, component architecture.
Comfortable working closely with engineers day-to-day. You have enough grasp of the implementation side to design things that are straightforward to implement, even without writing the code yourself.
Humility to accept feedback, adapt your thinking, and iterate toward the best solution
Self-starter mindset and comfort with moving from a fuzzy problem to a concrete flow without a detailed spec.

And some nice-to-haves...

These aren't requirements, but they'd give you a head start:

Experience designing software for scientific end-users.
Familiarity with modern frontend technologies (TypeScript, React, CSS).
Comfort with developer workflows and tools like Git.
Background in or enthusiasm for computational biology, bioinformatics, machine learning or related fields.

Our commitment to inclusive hiring

Cradle evaluates all candidates based on merit, regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, or any other aspect of identity. We maintain zero tolerance for discrimination and actively encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

AI disclosure

Cradle uses an applicant tracking system that includes basic AI-assisted features which may generate scores or rankings based on how applications match a job description. These outputs are not used to make or meaningfully influence hiring decisions — all candidates are evaluated through a thorough, human-led review by our recruiting team.

A notice about recruitment scams

Please be aware that scammers are posing as us in order to get your personal details or money. We only communicate via @cradle.bio email addresses, we only make job offers after having met you in person at our office in Zurich or Amsterdam, and we never ask you to pay for anything during the interview process.