Lead UX Designer

Condé Nast is a global media company, home to iconic brands including Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Glamour, AD, Vanity Fair, and Wired, among many others. The company's award-winning content reaches 84 million consumers in print, 367 million in digital, and 379 million across social platforms, generating more than 1 billion video views each month. The company operates in 32 markets worldwide, including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico & Latin America, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S., with local licence partners across the globe.

Condé Nast thrives on collaboration, and our teams come together in the office four days a week (Monday - Thursday). We value diversity of background, views and cultures. We celebrate people for their personal qualities, skills and contributions, recognising the power our brands have to influence and shape culture.

About Condé Nast Technology: Our mission is to empower the most iconic brands in media for business and creative success by creating the next-generation suite of content publishing and consumption experiences. We are a group of designers, product managers, engineers, strategists, and researchers dedicated to building innovative, user-centric products.

About our Design team: Our team is experienced in visual design, interaction design, content 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.

About the role: Our understanding of the audiences who consume our products, the contributors who shape them, and the landscape in which we operate is fundamental to the success of our products. Reporting to the UX Research Director, the Lead UX Researcher leads complex research across brands including Vogue, GQ and Condé Nast Traveller. The role takes accountability for research priorities, approach and delivery, using customer evidence to inform product direction and improve audience experiences.

Responsibilities of the role:

• Lead strategic customer research across the brand portfolio.
• Own the research agenda, aligning priorities around the decisions where customer understanding matters most.
• Lead qualitative and quantitative research across the product lifecycle, uncovering needs and opportunities while ensuring quality, inclusion and clear actions.
• Turn insight into recommendations that shape product direction and roadmap priorities, sharing learning across brands while respecting their distinct audiences.
• Focus human expertise on high-stakes questions requiring depth and judgement, enabling appropriate self-serve research for tactical needs.
• Build cross-functional alignment and influence.
• Partner across Product, Design, Engineering and Editorial to bring customer evidence into decisions early.
• Translate complex findings into clear narratives that build alignment and help teams act.
• Work with the UX Research Director to balance priorities and contribute to wider strategic initiatives.
• Help the UX Research Director evolve the team’s skills and methods as technology, customer expectations and business needs change.
• Pilot emerging methods and AI-enabled workflows, turning successful experiments into shared practices that improve research quality, pace and impact.
• Explore how AI changes content discovery and engagement to anticipate customer needs and future research opportunities.
• Apply human judgement and research rigour to business strategy, testing AI-generated insights and hypotheses against customer evidence.
• Develop shared tools, playbooks and standards with the UX Research Director and fellow Lead to enable effective self-serve research.
• Make customer intelligence accessible and reusable through shared repositories, AI-enabled tools and knowledge distribution programmes.
• Mentor researchers and coach colleagues through practical guidance, workshops and shared learning, building research confidence and AI fluency.

About you: You’re relentlessly customer-obsessed, curious about people and driven to make their experiences better. You ask good questions, challenge assumptions and take initiative to turn learning into action. You’re comfortable with ambiguity, move fast and stay focused on what matters most, using customer feedback to guide decisions without compromising quality. You take ownership of outcomes and stay involved from start to finish. An AI-native mindset is part of how you work: you experiment, apply sound judgement and share what you learn. You reach beyond your role, build new skills and work across disciplines to help the team succeed. You care about cultural brands and bringing audience needs, editorial ambition and business goals together.

Experience and capabilities:

• 7+ years in applied research, with a track record of shaping product and experience decisions.
• Strong qualitative and quantitative expertise, choosing methods to suit the question, risk and time available.
• Experience leading complex research independently, balancing priorities and adapting across teams.
• Strong synthesis and storytelling, turning research and analytics into clear recommendations that influence Product, Design and senior stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring researchers and coaching colleagues to use research effectively.
• Practical knowledge of research platforms, repositories and AI-assisted workflows, including their limitations and appropriate use.

What success looks like: Success means teams understand their customers well enough to make confident choices about what to prioritise, build and improve. Through strong research and trusted partnerships, the Lead turns that understanding into practical direction and helps colleagues build the confidence to act on it. Coaching, shared knowledge and AI-enabled self-serve tools extend this work across the organisation, helping more teams learn from customers and put that learning into practice.

What benefits do we offer? 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) and extra days of annual leave if you move house or want to volunteer. You’ll have access to a competitive pension scheme, Bupa Private Healthcare, Season ticket loans and eye tests. We offer a range of tools to support your wellbeing, including core hours, 10 remote days (from home or a country with a Condé Nast office location), access to our Employee Assistance Programme, corporate gym membership and cycle to work scheme. We’re a dog-friendly office, plus you’ll enjoy discounts and magazine subscriptions, keeping you up to date with all things Condé Nast. We encourage personal and professional growth through the Condé Nast Learning Hub, where you’ll find an extensive portfolio of learning courses and training available in local languages. Our Employee Resource Groups provide a platform for employees to identify shared objectives, exchange ideas, and work on community priorities for our global workforce.