UX and design recruitment in Mumbai

UX Recruitment Agency in Mumbai for Design Teams

Design hiring goes wrong when a polished portfolio is mistaken for craft and judgment. Talhive recruits UX, product design, research and design leadership for Mumbai employers, and for international companies building design capability in India.

  • Craft and systems thinking assessed
  • Designers and design leaders
  • 90-day replacement guarantee
Discuss a design search See how the search works
1,200+
Senior closes since 2016
270+
Founders, CHROs & GCC leaders served
20K+
Engineers in our proprietary pool
93%
Still in role at 12 months
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The quality of a search is determined early. Start with the role, the context, and what a strong hire looks like at 12 months.

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Selected clients
NBA · DNEG · Atlan · Loopio · Writesonic · Arya.ai · ketteQ · BRABENDER Group · Khatabook
Trusted on
Leadership and specialist search · India team builds · Off-market talent pools · High consequence hires
Design hiring

Hiring designers who think in systems, not screens.

A designer's value shows in the decisions behind the work: the constraint they accepted, the research that changed their mind, the system others could build on. Talhive's design hiring practice assesses those decisions through case discussion and critique, not only through a portfolio of finished screens.

Mumbai has a deep creative economy: branding and communication agencies, media and entertainment studios, and consumer brands. Designers from these backgrounds increasingly move into product and UX work, which is one reason portfolios alone mislead. Employers need to see how someone thinks about users, systems and constraints.

Beyond the portfolio

Portfolio review and craft assessment are different things.

What each tells you, and what it leaves out.

Portfolio review alone
Craft and judgment assessment
What you see
Finished screens and case-study slides
The reasoning, constraints and trade-offs behind them
Role in the work
Team output that may not be the candidate's
What the candidate personally decided and delivered
Systems thinking
Rarely visible in a deck
Probed through a critique of a system they built or inherited
Collaboration
Assumed from presentation style
Explored with product and engineering partners in past work
Seniority
Judged by title and tool fluency
Judged by scope, influence and the standards they set

Our guides explain how we evaluate design portfolios.

Evaluating a product designer portfolio A portfolio review day
Roles we recruit

Design profiles for Mumbai teams.

From a first designer to design leadership.

Product Designer

End-to-end design of product flows, from problem framing to shipped interface, working with engineering and product. See product designers.

UX and UI Designer

Interaction and visual design for web and mobile, assessed for craft and for how well the work holds up in use.

UX Researcher

Qualitative and quantitative research that changes product decisions, not only reports.

Design Systems Designer

Component libraries, tokens and the working agreements that let many designers ship consistently. Our note on design system ownership explains why the mandate matters.

Design Lead

Hands-on leaders who set the bar for a squad or a product area and mentor designers.

Design leadership

Heads of design who build the team, the process and the relationship with product and engineering. See when to hire a VP of Design.

Design disciplines
Interaction design
Visual design
Research
Design systems
Content design
Prototyping
Brand to product
Mumbai context

What Mumbai's design ecosystem means for a search.

How it shapes the profiles, not a claim about market size.

Agency to product moves.

Many strong visual and communication designers in the city come from agencies and studios. The question is whether they have worked on a product over time, with iteration, analytics and engineering constraints. We assess for that shift explicitly.

Media and consumer craft.

Entertainment, media and consumer brands produce designers with real visual and motion craft. For product teams that is valuable when paired with systems thinking and research habits.

International teams, local designers.

For a head of design abroad, hiring in Mumbai means remote critique, written rationale and shared tools. We look for candidates who communicate their reasoning clearly across time zones.

How the search works

A design search built around craft.

Critique and case discussion sit at the centre.

  1. Stage one
    01

    Set the design bar.

    What good looks like here.

    • Product context, team and who the designer partners with
    • The mix of craft, research and systems skills needed
    • Seniority defined by scope and influence
  2. Stage two
    02

    Find designers who ship.

    Passive mapping.

    • Designers working on live products, including from agency and studio backgrounds
    • Outreach about the product and the design culture
    • Location and remote expectations settled early
  3. Stage three
    03

    Critique and calibrate.

    Craft, judgment and collaboration.

    • Case discussion of decisions and constraints
    • Twelve dimensions including motivation and collaboration
    • Up to five profiles, each with a written rationale
  4. Stage four
    04

    Offer and settle.

    Through joining and beyond.

    • Offer strategy and counter-offer planning
    • Notice-period tracking until the start date
    • 90-day replacement guarantee
Frequently asked

Questions employers ask

Plain answers to the questions we hear most often about this search.

A UX designer often focuses on research, flows and interaction. A product designer usually covers the whole journey, from problem framing to visual design and working with engineering. Many companies use the titles loosely, so we define the scope of the work before we start searching.
Yes. Researchers are assessed on whether their work changed product decisions, how they chose methods and how they communicate findings to non-researchers. We also consider whether the role needs a dedicated researcher or a designer with strong research habits.
If you have a product direction and need execution, a strong senior designer can start. If you need to define a design function, process and standards, a leader is the better first hire. We help you choose before the search begins, based on your team and goals.
We use case discussion and critique of work the candidate has shipped, including how they would approach a problem from your product. For an international head of design, we also test written communication and the clarity of design rationale shared asynchronously.
Yes. We look for evidence of systems that others adopted: component libraries, tokens, documentation and the governance that kept them consistent. This role needs a clear mandate, and we will help you define it so the right candidate sees a real opportunity.

Hire designers who shape the product, not just the screen.

Share the product and the design challenge. We will tell you what kind of design hire you need and whether to start the search.

Discuss a design search
India + Vietnam operating base: strong overlap across Europe, APAC, and scheduled US client windows
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Markets covered: India, North America, Europe, and APAC

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In Mumbai

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