Spruce Systems Opportunities

In just over two years, we’ve gone from 0 to over 750 customers, succeeding where many have tried and failed before. We have a big mission: to make it wildly easier and more profitable to run and grow a renewables installation business – and through that to make a massive dent in the world’s carbon emissions and create a hugely better experience for homeowners. We’re now looking for a stellar Product Designer who’s buzzing to create exceptional experiences for installers as we expand into new markets. 🌲 ABOUT SPRUCE

• Almost 20% of the UK’s carbon emissions comes from heating homes – there’s simply no way to make reach net zero without phasing out gas and oil boilers. Right now the only serious alternative is heat pumps, with their almost-magical ability to turn 1 kW of electricity into 3-5 kW of heat (🤯). But the heat pump installation journey is slow, inefficient, and just so painful. This makes it hard for existing installers to grow their businesses and puts off gas engineers from starting to do heat pumps. Perhaps most critically, it means you can’t currently offer a heat pump when someone’s boiler breaks and they urgently need heating.
• We’re fixing this. We’ve built a platform for heat pump installers to manage the whole installation journey from initial enquiry through to final compliance paperwork, freeing up their time to focus on what really matters: doing high-quality installations, providing great customer service, and scaling their business. Despite only getting started at the beginning of 2024, we’re having a massive impact on installation businesses, suppliers, and manufacturers across the UK: halving the time they spend on each job and doubling their sales conversion rates.
• We raised a chunky Seed round last year from top-tier investors and have been scaling the team to massively grow our impact. We’re in the process of expanding outside heat pumps and by the end of the year will be an operating system for the whole home renewables supply chain. If you can picture a combination of ServiceTitan, Procore, and autoCAD, you might get a sense of where we’re headed… 🥖 THE ROLE You’ll be central to our mission as we turn historically slow and painful processes into ones that are quick, intuitive and even delightful for installers. We’ve been design-led since the beginning but the challenge is only growing as our product becomes (necessarily) more complex. Day-to-day you’ll be:
• Making complex decisions feel effortless – Our platform handles everything from building physics calculations to fluid dynamics modelling to complicated compliance requirements. We need to make handling that complexity feel effortless for all our customers, irrespective of how tech-savvy they are.
• Designing across multiple touchpoints – You'll work on desktop design tools, homeowner-facing outputs, enquiry flows, mobile survey apps (incl LiDAR), and collaborative workflows that work seamlessly across different user types (from 3-person local installers to national utilities);
• Collaborating closely with developers & shipping code yourself – Understanding data structures and technical constraints so your designs can be shipped quickly; and shipping PRs yourself when it makes sense (with the support of the dev team);
• Building systematic, scalable design systems – Creating robust, structured, and reusable components that work across platforms and for potentially low-tech users;
• Researching and validating - Interviewing and spending time with installers to deeply understand how they work and what the core problems to solve are; and building quick prototypes to test and validate design decisions and uncover unexpected pain points. You'll report directly to Steph, our Co-Founder and CPO. 🫵 ABOUT YOU We’re looking for a designer with 3+ years of product/UI design experience (and potentially a lot more), ideally in a startup context or within fast-paced, impact-focussed teams. We'd love to speak with you if you are:
• A clear, systematic thinker who loves tackling complex flows;
• Comfortable with diving into technical detail, even if it’s a new domain;
• User-obsessed; you enjoy deeply understanding the user, solving their problems and making a tangible impact on them;
• Great with people and confident running research with customers;
• Proactive and self-organising, happy juggling multiple projects; Bonus if you’ve worked on tools for field teams, low-tech users, or on operational workflows (but absolutely not a requirement!). 🌟 OUR OFFER
• 💰 £60-110k salary, depending on experience.
• 🍰 Meaningful slice of equity (options) in the company
• 🏖️ 33 days holiday and opportunity to work from abroad for another 30 days each year
• 🏡 Hybrid working: 2–3 days in-person a week (London or Bristol), with full-team meetups every fortnight
• 🏥 Private Medical Cover
• 👧 Workplace Nursery Benefit scheme (YellowNest https://www.yellownest.co.uk/parent)
• 🧑‍🍼 Enhanced Parental Leave
• 🚲 Cycle to Work scheme
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Brilliant team to learn from and massive opportunity to grow 🧑‍💻 WORKING AT SPRUCE
• We’re currently a close-knit team of 28, split between London and Bristol. We spend 2-3 days each week working together in-person in both locations, and get everyone altogether every fortnight.
• You'll have genuine influence from day one. The best idea wins regardless of seniority. We expect you to challenge everything, ask "why?" multiple levels deep, and push back when something doesn't make sense.
• We want everyone to spend time with installers on-site, feel their pain points, then be able to rapidly suggest and implement solutions based on real feedback rather than assumptions. This is clearly particularly important for this role but you’ll be surrounded by a whole team who are also close to our customers.
• We move fast and ship imperfect things, learning from users rather than trying to perfect in isolation. When things break, we focus on how we fix it, what can we learn and never blame. You'll own your outcomes whilst knowing the team has your back.
• Feedback is constant, direct, and kind – we'll tell you when something isn't working and expect the same honesty (and empathy) back.