Conversation Designer

This is a freelance/contractor position for someone who is resident in Portugal

Aida has a distinct personality: a wise, warm guide who helps people understand their finances without making them feel patronised or judged. Getting that right in a single response is one thing. Getting it right across an entire conversation journey, consistently and at scale, is the next frontier for us. It's where we want to invest next.

This is a new, dedicated role for someone whose craft is the end-to-end shape of a journey: how Aida enters, what she asks, how she presents choices and how it feels in flow. You'll own how Aida talks across the structured journeys that sit at the heart of the product, working alongside our design team and engineers to bring conversation design into its own as a discipline at Money Means.

The way we want this role to operate is closer to an incubator than a documentation function. You'll build functioning prototypes, not just static maps. You'll get them in front of real users early. And you'll hand engineering something concrete to build from.

About Money Means

Money Means exists because good financial advice has always been a privilege, and we think that's wrong. We're building Aida, an AI-powered tool that gives people genuinely useful, personalised financial guidance (and in the near future, financial advice) without the cost or jargon of traditional advice. We're a mission-driven team of 13 building a fast-paced, agile environment where your skills and ideas can truly make a difference.

Key Responsibilities

• Design the conversational architecture of Aida's key journeys: how they open, what choices get surfaced and when, how Aida presents options and what happens at decision points.
• Build functioning prototypes (using Claude or similar) so the team can experience a journey before it's engineered — static maps and scripts aren't enough on their own.
• Translate product goals, user research and design thinking into experience maps that show the solution space, the data and knowledge sources required and the controls a journey needs to behave well in production.
• Stress-test prototypes with real users to find where conversations break, where utterances deform the intended pattern, and where guardrails are needed before engineering builds.
• Define and document what "correct" looks like for different journey types, and produce reference conversations that serve as inputs for AI training, eval design and team alignment.
• Co-own the evaluation loop: work with engineering and our subject-matter experts to feed signal from production conversations back into design, so journeys keep improving once they're live.
• Hold the standard for Aida's conversational consistency across the product, catching and correcting drift as new journeys are added.

How You'll Work

Conversation design at Money Means is treated as an incubator, not a hand-off function. A few things that means in practice:

• Shift left. You'll work ahead of engineering, not in parallel with them. The goal is to give engineering everything they need to ship quickly and confidently, not to redline copy after the fact.
• Prototype, don't draft. A functioning prototype tells stakeholders far more about an AI product than a Figma flow ever can. You'll build them with Claude doing the lifting on the code side. You don't need to be a strong coder — just willing to learn enough to get something working.
• Test on the real thing. Where it's useful, we want POCs in front of users. That's how we see where utterances pull the journey out of shape, where hallucination risk creeps in and where we need additional knowledge sources or controls.
• Flag unknowns, don't paper over them. Designing for AI means designing in a probabilistic environment. We'd rather know early that we have a data gap or a behaviour we can't predict than discover it mid-build.
• Collaborate across the stack. You'll work directly with product, design, engineering and our SMEs. Prompt engineering is part of the picture; your leverage is designing and evidencing journeys end-to-end.

What This Role Isn't

• Not a UI designer. You'll work closely with our design team, but your craft is in conversation, not screens.
• Not a copywriter or content designer. There's writing involved, but the role is about the architecture of conversations and the prototypes that prove them, not the words on a single page.
• Not a static-artefacts role. Figma flows and conversation maps are inputs, not the deliverable.
• Not the product roadmap owner. You'll have strong influence on what we build, but the roadmap sits with product.

How We Work

• Prototype-first. Static mocks aren't enough. We want functional prototypes early, so the team has something real to react to.
• Weekly outputs in discovery. When we're working out what to build, we expect something every week. Not perfect, but tangible.
• AI tools are part of the workflow, not optional extras. Everyone in the team has a Claude Max subscription, and we top that up with an AI tools allowance. We expect people to use them.
• Cross-functional by default. You'll work directly with product, design, engineering and our subject-matter experts.
• Comfort with imperfect V1s. Shipping something good and learning beats shipping something perfect and slow.
• Fast-moving startup environment with lots of ambiguity. The people who thrive here are the ones who like that.

Why You'll Thrive Here

• Own something that matters. Conversation design at Money Means is core to what makes Aida work. You'll have genuine ownership over how the product communicates.
• Push your craft. Designing AI conversation at the level of a journey, not just a response, is a relatively new discipline. We're set up for you to build, test and shape what good looks like, not to defend an existing playbook.
• Real autonomy, real specialists. Small enough that your decisions are visible, big enough that you have specialists to collaborate with.
• Join at the right moment. We're in beta with a product that has strong foundations and a clear voice. There's real work to do and real room to shape how it gets done.

Key Skills & Experience

• Experience in conversation design, UX writing or a closely related role where you've owned the quality and structure of a conversational product end-to-end.
• A portfolio or examples of conversation flows, dialogue scripts or, ideally, functioning prototypes you've built or shaped, not just contributed to.
• Genuine understanding of how conversational AI works: how prompt design, system context and user utterances combine to shape model behaviour and the user experience.
• Comfort with probabilistic interactions — AI isn't deterministic, and the design discipline has to reflect that.
• Willingness to build prototypes, not just design them. You don't need to be a strong coder, but you'll use Claude (or similar) to ship something functional yourself.
• The ability to write clearly and with care. Aida's voice is specific, and you'll need to write in it convincingly.
• Experience working in cross-functional teams alongside product, designers and engineers, not just handing off documents.
• Comfortable with complex, branching interactions and decision-heavy flows. You can hold a multi-step journey in your head without losing the user's perspective.

Bonus points

• Background in a regulated environment (financial services, health or similar)
• Experience designing for mobile-first conversational products
• Familiarity with behavioural finance principles or user psychology in high-stakes decision contexts
• Experience contributing to an evaluation loop for an AI product
• Experience at an early-stage company or where the discipline was new to the organisation

Our Interview Process

1. Initial conversation. Get to know each other, talk through your experience and where we're headed.
2. Design exercise. A practical task to see how you approach a journey end-to-end. We want a working prototype (Claude very much welcome), not a polished doc. We care more about how you think than how it looks.
3. Team session. Meet the people you'd be working with day-to-day and walk us through your work on the design challenge.

Working Arrangement

• Engagement: Freelance, B2B contract basis
• Day rate: Agreed during the interview process
• Location: Tax-resident in Portugal, working remotely
• Hours: Some overlap with UK working hours

Equal Opportunities

We're committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of the people Aida is built to serve. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, and we'd rather hear from someone who brings something different than hire the same profile twice. If you don't tick every box but think you'd be great in this role, please apply anyway. If you need any adjustments during the application or interview process, just let us know.

Ready to Make a Difference?

Apply today and help us create a world where everyone has access to the financial advice they need!

• Hiring Manager: Dan Wells | Design Lead | dan@moneymeans.co.uk