Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection. Sun King has connected more than 27 million homes to solar power across Africa and Asia.
Sun King employs over 4,100+ full-time staff in 15 countries, with specialities spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 44% of Sun King’s workforce.
We’re growing quickly, and Sun King Kenya has been recognised by Great Place to Work for our supportive and friendly workplace culture. We’re always on the lookout for talented, enthusiastic, and hard-working people to join our team. Scroll down to explore the different career paths available at Sun King and apply for a role.
Senior Product Designer at Sun King
Job Location: Nairobi, Kenya or Lagos, Nigeria
About the role:
The Senior Product Designer (UX Designer), based in Nairobi or
Lagos. You will report to the Head of Product, Enterprise Products.
You will own the experience of the products our customers, field agents and our
staff teams use every day. That covers the apps our Energy Officers use to
sell, onboard and service customers. It also covers the products our customers
use to buy, pay for and manage their energy. It covers the tools our staff uses
to manage the inventory, sales, collections, incentives, etc every day.
And it covers the design system that holds all of it.
The people you design for are not like you. Many are first-time smartphone
users. They work outdoors, on low-end Android devices, on patchy networks,
often in their second or third language. A design succeeds here when an agent
can close a sale in a village at the end of a long day. It is not judged by how
the screen looks in a portfolio.
We also want an AI-first approach to design. You reach for AI to explore
concepts, generate variants and pressure-test copy. You prototype before writing
a specification. You ask “can AI do this better” first, not as an afterthought.
This role covers design end to end. Research, flows, interaction design, visual
design, prototyping and handoff. We expect all of it done the AI-first way:
faster, sharper, and built to scale.
What you would be expected to do:
1. Research with the people who actually use our products
- Spend
time in the field with Energy Officers, customers and operations teams.
Watch them work. Do not rely on second-hand reports.
- Run
usability tests, contextual interviews and concept tests in market.
- Turn
what you learn into choice the team acts on, not decks that get filed
away.
2. Flows and interaction design
- Design
the end-to-end journeys behind sales, onboarding, collections, servicing
and assist.
- Map
the offline steps as well as the on-screen ones. Most of our journeys
start on paper or in conversation.
- Simplify
flows that have grown complicated over years of feature additions.
3. Visual design and craft
- Take
work from rough concept to production-ready screens.
- Hold
a high bar on typography, spacing, ranking and legibility in bright
sunlight on small screens.
- Make
the interface teachable. A new agent should be productive on day one.
4. Design for real constraints
- Design
for low-end Android devices, small screens and limited storage.
- Design
for intermittent flow. Offline states, sync and failure recovery are part
of the design, not an engineering afterthought.
- Design
for low digital literacy and for multiple languages. Assume text will be
longer once translated.
5. The design system
- Own
our collective component library and design standards.
- Keep
it in step with what engineering actually ships. A system nobody uses is
worse than none.
- Document
patterns so other designers and engineers can apply them without asking
you.
6. Prototype before spec
- Build
clickable prototypes to answer open questions early.
- Use AI
tools to generate variants, draft copy and explore directions quickly.
- Put
prototypes in front of real users and change your mind when they tell you
to.
7. Handoff and working with engineering
- Produce
handoff-ready files, specs and states that engineers can build from
without guesswork.
- Cover
the unglamorous cases: empty states, errors, loading, long names, missing
data, poor network.
- Review
builds before release and hold the bar on implementation quality.
8. Measure whether the design worked
- Define
what success looks like before the design ships: task completion, time on
task, error and drop-off rates.
- Work
with product and data teams to read adoption and funnel data after
release.
- Go
back and fix what the data says is not working.
9. Team Work
- Work
closely with product managers, engineers and market operations teams
through the full product lifecycle.
- Bring
evidence to design debates. Be willing to be overruled, and be willing to
argue your case.
- Keep
stakeholders informed at every stage.
10. Travel
- Travel
as required to Sun King markets, including Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria,
Tanzania and Myanmar, with regular field visits to agents and customers.
You might be a strong candidate if you have/are:
1. Background and approach
- A
portfolio of shipped product work (mandatory). We want two or three cases
in depth: the problem, what you tried, what you did, and what happened
after launch.
- 5–7
years designing digital products, with meaningful time on mobile.
- Experience
designing for users who are not like you, ideally in emerging markets,
field operations, fintech or last-mile distribution.
- Able
to structure and evaluate ambiguous problems.
- Clear
communication in writing. You will explain design choice to people who are
not designers.
- A
proactive attitude and willingness to get hands-on. We are small and you
will do your own research, design and testing.
- A
formal design degree is welcome but not required. The portfolio matters
more.
2. Language
- Professional
working proficiency in English (mandatory). You will work with colleagues
and stakeholders across our markets in Africa and Asia.
- A
local market language such as Swahili, French, Hausa, Yoruba or Luganda is
a strong plus for field research.
3. Essential skills
- Expert
in Figma, including components, variables, auto layout and prototyping.
- Hands-on
experience building or maintaining a design system.
- Practical
research skills: usability testing, contextual inquiry and field
interviews, run by you rather than outsourced.
- Android
design conventions and Material Design, applied with judgement rather than
by default.
- Accessibility
and legibility fundamentals: contrast, touch targets, text scaling, and
patterns that work for low-literacy users.
- Enough
data literacy to read a funnel, an adoption chart or an A/B test result
and act on it.
- Comfortable
using AI tools in your design workflow, for concepts, copy, research
synthesis and prototypes.
4. Good to have
- Experience
designing offline-first or intermittently integrated applications.
- Front-end
familiarity (HTML, CSS, or React) — enough to talk to engineers about what
is expensive to build.
- Motion
design or illustration.
- Service
design experience covering journeys that cross online and offline steps.
- Exposure
to pay-as-you-go, asset finance, microfinance or emerging-market lending.
- Hands-on
experience with SQL.
What Sun King Offers
- Professional
growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry.
- An
open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who
are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on
people and the planet.
- A
truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and
learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and
backgrounds.
- Structured,
tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better
leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for
Leadership.