Product Design Lead

Condé Nast • New York, NY

8d

About The Position

Condé Nast stands as a distinguished media powerhouse, celebrated for curating top-tier content for the globe's most impactful audiences. Engaging over a billion consumers through its cutting-edge print, digital, and video brands, the portfolio proudly features some of the most iconic titles in the media landscape, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and WIRED. Consistently delivering excellence, Condé Nast extends its influence across 32 markets worldwide, with headquarters in both London and New York, embodying a commitment to quality and innovation.

Condé Nast Technology builds the products, systems, and experiences that power our brands. Our mission is to enable creativity and business growth through next-generation publishing, loyalty, and commerce platforms. We’re a global team of designers, engineers, product managers, and researchers dedicated to creating innovative, user-centric products that enable world-class storytelling and digital experiences. You’ll be part of a talented international team working across London, New York, and ten other markets, collaborating daily with colleagues in Product, Engineering, Architecture, Design, UX, and Data. We partner closely with Consumer Marketing, Commercial, Licensing, Editorial, and Brand teams to ensure our tools and experiences deliver real impact. Together, we’re shaping how our brands create, publish, and connect with audiences worldwide, combining craft, technology, and collaboration to deliver quality at scale.

Our team is experienced in visual design, ux design, interaction design, and design research. We partner closely with editorial, product management, engineering, and business partners to strategise, design, and launch ambitious digital products. We believe that a well-formed design culture is essential to delivering top-notch work.

Our brands are our USP. The expression of our iconic brands – from Vogue to the New Yorker – within their digital experiences is of utmost importance in our mission to create the best places to consume and interact with our brands. We are looking for a Product Design Lead to help us bring to life our brands’ unique personalities across our websites, toeing the line between consistency and distinction. You’ll work across multiple brands, using new or existing capabilities in our design system to improve the storytelling, finesse, and distinctiveness of our digital experiences. This role sits at the intersection of system and story, taking what we’ve built and making it better through focus, craft, and attention to detail. You’ll move fast, get hands-on, and make tangible improvements across our front-end at scale. This isn’t a management role; it’s a senior IC position for someone who can design, finesse, and implement independently while building trusted partnerships across editorial, design, product, and engineering.

Requirements

• You move easily between system and brand thinking, understanding how shared components underpin consistency, and how to stretch them to deliver distinctive brand expression.
• You value clarity, rhythm, and restraint, and you know that craft is often what separates good from great.
• You have a genuine love for editorial design and storytelling - you understand the role design plays in how stories are expressed and experienced
• You move easily between system and brand thinking, understanding how shared components underpin consistency, and where to stretch them to deliver distinctive moments
• You are confident speaking the language of both brand teams (Creative Directors, Editors) and engineers, being able to navigate both creative and technical conversations. You’re equally comfortable in Figma and GitHub.
• You are outcome-oriented and are able to bring initiative and a self-starter attitude.
• You’re familiar with CMS-driven design environments and multi-brand complexity.
• You are passionate about your craft; you have a strong eye for hierarchy, typography, and composition, and an instinct for orchestrating these to create delightful interactions.
• You are curious about new tools, what AI means for our craft, and how our brands and experiences will continue to evolve, always looking for smarter, more creative ways to design and deliver quality.
• You’re a strong communicator; you communicate clearly and collaborate openly, giving and receiving feedback with equal care.
• Experience: 5+ years in design roles, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Design or related fields preferable
• Strong creative brand sensitivity and how you interpret and express a brand identity within shared design systems or structured frameworks.
• Editorial and content-led design with examples of how you design for storytelling, hierarchy, and content-rich journeys, ideally within digital publishing or media contexts.
• System fluency and how you’ve refined or extended design systems, component libraries, or configuration layers to elevate quality and brand expression.
• Craft range through work that spans from clean, systematic interfaces to expressive, identity-led experiences.
• Implementation quality with evidence that your design intent carried through to production; how you’ve worked with engineers or used tools (Figma, configs, tokens) to ensure fidelity.
• Visual judgement and examples showing confident hierarchy, rhythm, motion, and composition - with a clear point of view on what “great” looks like online.
• Curiosity and progression, including signs that you stay current, experiment with new tools or technologies (including AI), and push your craft forward.

Responsibilities

• Elevating visual quality You focus on the visual standard of our sites, ensuring every interaction, layout, and detail feels deliberate, cohesive, and premium - driving improvements in typography, rhythm, and composition to create experiences that are refined and unmistakably Condé Nast.
• Partnering across teams You build trusted partnerships across design, editorial, product, and engineering to align brand ambition with platform capability. You translate editorial and creative goals into actionable design improvements that strengthen both storytelling and usability.
• Crafting with systems thinking You champion design excellence within the parameters of a shared system. You balance brand expression with scalability and performance, ensuring component use remains consistent, purposeful, and high-quality.
• Delivering hands-on impact You take ownership of tangible quality improvements across our brands. You move quickly and independently, identifying and executing high-value design opportunities that elevate our products.
• Championing design culture You model craft, curiosity, and clarity through your work. You set the standard for what “good” looks like, mentoring through example and helping to raise the collective bar across the design organisation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level