Senior UI Designer

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

Senior User Interface Designers craft high quality, intuitive, and scalable digital interfaces that enable exceptional customer experiences across Absa’s digital ecosystem.

They solve complex customer and business problems through deep expertise in visual design, interaction design, and design systems, combined with a strong understanding of customer behaviour and platform constraints.

They take ownership of UI standards and quality, collaborating closely with Product Designers, UX Designers, Engineers, and Product Managers to ensure consistency, usability, accessibility, and brand alignment at scale.

Senior UI Designers are craft leaders in their discipline. They define, evolve, and govern design standards, while still contributing hands on to delivery. They bring clarity to complex concepts through strong visual storytelling and champion design excellence in fast moving, constrained environments.

Job Description

Accountability: Problem Solving and Execution
• Partner with Design Project Leads, Product Designers, and Design Managers and Business stakeholders to unpack complex problems and translate customer needs into clear UI‑focused problem statements.
• Lead the definition of UI approach, scope, outputs, and milestones for projects within your discipline.
• Translate complex product, technical, and customer concepts into clear, intuitive, and aesthetically strong interface solutions.
• Execute day‑to‑day high‑quality UI design across multiple journeys or products, solving one complex or several interconnected customer problems.
• Design optimal interface solutions through rapid exploration, iteration, testing, and refinement.
• Advocate for and apply human‑centred design and design thinking practices, with a strong emphasis on usability and clarity.
• Take ownership of UI standards adherence, constructively challenging decisions that compromise quality, scalability, accessibility, or consistency.
• Proactively collaborate with design, product, and engineering teams working on related journeys to ensure cohesive experiences.

Accountability: High‑Quality Interface Design
• Design creative, innovative, and world‑class interfaces that elevate customer experience across Absa’s digital platforms.
• Provide hands‑on contribution to complex projects while offering UI thought leadership and expert guidance.
• Apply design best practices and UI principles to explore options, evaluate trade‑offs, and converge on optimal solutions.
• Leverage insights and data — including usability testing, customer feedback, analytics, and benchmarking — to inform interface decisions and improve experience quality.
• Create wireframes, high‑fidelity mock‑ups, interaction designs, and prototypes appropriate to each stage of delivery.
• Ensure all designs align with brand guidelines, accessibility standards, and design system principles, creating a consistent experience across the Absa ecosystem.

Accountability: Building UI Capability
• Lead the User Interface discipline by defining, maintaining, and evolving UI standards, patterns, and guidelines.
• Contribute to and help shape design systems and component libraries, ensuring scalability and ease of reuse.
• Stay current with global UI, interaction, and visual design trends, sharing relevant insights with the broader design community.
• Mentor UI and junior designers through craft guidance, critique, and skills development.
• Continuously develop your own expertise through feedback, reflection, experimentation, and learning.
• Actively contribute to team‑wide knowledge sharing by showcasing work, sharing learnings, and supporting design excellence across initiatives.

Education and Experience Required
• Matric (mandatory)
• Degree or diploma in a Design discipline (NQF level 7) such as:
• Interaction Design
• Digital or Visual Design
• Graphic or Communication Design
• Multimedia Design
• Product or Service Design
• Minimum 8 years and a minimum of 8+ years in design craft (experience)
• Strong technical, craft and Ai skills
• Proven track record of delivering complex, high‑quality interface design solutions with measurable customer and business impact.
• Experience working across the full product delivery lifecycle (analysis, design, build, launch, iteration).
• Strong ability to communicate ideas visually through sketches, design tools, prototypes, interaction flows, and presentations.

Knowledge and Skills
• Advanced expertise in User Interface and Interaction Design.
• Strong understanding of how UI integrates with UX, service design, and technology constraints.
• Exceptional visual design, layout, typography, and interaction craft skills.
• Advanced proficiency in design tools relevant to UI design (e.g. Figma or equivalent).
• Strong ability to use data, insight, and feedback to inform and justify design decisions.
• Awareness of emerging UI patterns, accessibility standards, and platform conventions.

Education

Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (Required)

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised