Senior Product Packaging Designer

# Senior Product Packaging Designer - Adobe Illustrator, Dielines, Regulated Health Products

**Job type:** Full time (40 hours per week)
**Hours:** Core overlap with UK working hours. Our founders sit in the UK and the Caribbean, our factories are in China and our compliance consultants are in the US, so you will be scheduling around several clocks. Most of your live contact will be UK morning to early afternoon.
**Salary:** $1.2-1.8k - reviewed at 3 months and again at 6.
**Start:** As soon as we find the right person.

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## Read this part first

This is not a graphics role. We are not looking for someone to make social tiles, resize banners or tidy up Canva templates.

We design and manufacture regulated consumer health products. Sterile saline, nebulisers, wound wash, contact lens solutions, CPAP wipes, nasal aspirators. Every pack we produce has to survive a factory, a regulatory consultant, a translator, a notified body and an Amazon listing before it is allowed to exist. If a symbol is missing, a decimal point is a full stop instead of a comma, or a claim on the front panel is one word too strong, the whole production run stops.

You need to be proficient in Adobe Illustrator and you need to have designed product packaging that has actually gone to print. If you have not done both, please do not apply. We will not be able to train you into this.

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## What you would actually be doing

Our product development runs in a channel per product in Slack. A product gets a channel, a sourcing lead who deals with the factory, a compliance reviewer, and a designer. That designer is who we are hiring.

A typical job runs like this. A brief lands with you covering the category, the competitive set, the claims we are allowed to make and the print constraints. The factory sends a dieline, usually an .ai file, sometimes unclear about flap positions or sticker placement. You come back with three or four routes as front panels. The founders pick a direction and we iterate on a call. You then build the full artwork across every surface, front, back, sides, cartons, foil pouches, vial labels and the instructions leaflet. It goes to our compliance consultant for wording and to the factory for technical approval. Both come back with changes. The factory sometimes comes back with ten or more comments on a single card file, and sometimes comes back again two days later. You apply them, cleanly, without breaking the layout, and you flag the ones that need to go back to the translators rather than silently guessing.

Then it goes to print, and the same brand needs a matching set for the Amazon listing.

Alongside that, we are building a set of in-house brand systems in Figma that everything has to sit inside, and a new internal system that tracks every design stage. You would be one of the people making that real rather than just working inside it.

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## The AI part

We use AI heavily and we expect you to. Our briefs are generated with AI. Concept imagery, moodboards, brand territories, palette and type exploration, competitor analysis, lifestyle visuals for listings, all of it starts with AI in our workflow now.

What we have not been able to buy is the person who takes that output and turns it into something a factory can actually print. That is the job. AI gives you a look. You give us a production file on a real dieline with the correct bleed, the correct spot colours, the legally required text at the legally required size and the barcodes in the right place.

To be blunt about it, we want someone who is fast and fluent with AI image and brand tools, and then completely rigorous in Illustrator. Either half on its own is not enough.

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## Specific things you will be expected to handle

1. Working directly from factory dielines and querying the factory yourself when the dieline is ambiguous, rather than waiting to be told.
2. Designing to hard print constraints. A recent brief had print tooling at 60 dollars per colour across two artworks, so the design had to work in three colours plus black. That is normal for us.
3. Designing the front panel knowing it doubles as our Amazon main image, which means it has to read at 150 pixels before it has to look good at full size.
4. Multi-language artwork. Our EU packs run French, German and Dutch on the same carton. You will be managing language columns, comma decimals, correct notation and consistent terminology across the carton, the foil pack, the label and the leaflet.
5. Regulatory furniture. CE marking, UDI codes, symbols such as "do not reuse", manufacturer and EU representative addresses, lot and expiry fields, ingredient and directions panels.
6. Instructions for use leaflets and multi-page folded artwork.
7. Building and maintaining brand packs. Logo, type, colour, usage rules, held properly in Figma so the rest of the team can work from it.
8. Version control that does not fall apart. We have had situations where nobody could say which of three label variants was current. We do not want that again.
9. Amazon listing and A+ content built from the same brand system, including correct metadata tagging when AI generated people appear in imagery.

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## Who you would work with

You would report to our CMO and work daily with our operations lead, our sourcing lead who manages the Chinese factories, our regulatory consultants, our Amazon team and one of our company directors, who reviews front-of-pack personally. Feedback comes fast and direct. Nobody here dresses up a note. If something is wrong you will be told plainly, and we expect the same from you when a request is going to cause a print problem.

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## What we need from you

Proficiency in Adobe Illustrator at production level. Not familiarity. Proficiency.

Real product packaging experience. Cartons, labels, pouches, leaflets, things that were physically manufactured.

Comfort with dielines, bleed, die cuts, spot colours, Pantone, CMYK separations, overprint, varnish and print-ready PDF export.

Enough attention to detail that you catch the missing space in a German compound word before the manufacturer does.

The temperament for constant change. Factories change specs. Regulators change wording. We change our minds. Somebody who needs a brief to be final before they can start will not enjoy this job.

Clear written English. Most of our work happens in writing, across time zones, and a lot of it involves explaining a technical constraint to someone who is not a designer.

Good to have, not essential: InDesign, Photoshop, Figma, 3D mockup or render work, experience with medical device or OTC pharmaceutical packaging, experience with Amazon listing imagery, experience with EU MDR or FDA labelling.

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## Do not apply if

You have never opened a dieline.

Your portfolio is mockups and concepts with nothing that went to production.

You work only in Canva or Photoshop.

You need every instruction spelled out before you can move.

You are applying to ten jobs today with the same message.

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## How to apply

Please follow this exactly. We use it as the first filter and we do read every application that follows it.

Start your message with the word **DIELINE** so we know you read to the end.

Then send us, in one message:

1. A link to your portfolio, and inside that, point us to two packaging projects that went to print. For each one, tell us in a sentence or two what the print constraints were and what you had to solve.
2. One production file. An .ai or a print-ready PDF of packaging you built, ideally on a supplied dieline. Redact anything confidential, we just need to see how you build a file.
3. Your answer to this, in no more than four sentences: a factory sends you a dieline with no indication of where the opening flap sits or what size the sticker on top of it is, and the artwork is due in three days. What do you do?
4. One example of how you have used AI in your design work, and where you d ---------- AI was not good enough and did it manually instead.
5. Your monthly rate expectation and your available hours in UK time.

Shortlisted applicants will be given a **paid test project**. We will send you a real dieline, a short brief with mandatory compliance text, and a print constraint. You will produce one front panel concept plus the full wrap as a production file, and a short note listing every question you would put to the factory before release. We pay for that work whether or not we hire you, and we will give you honest feedback either way.

We move quickly. If you are right for this, you will know within two weeks.