Senior Design Director, Publishing Platform in Whitehall

Responsibilities

• Owning the line between scale and expression. You'll be the principal decision-maker on one of the most consequential design tensions in the business: what gets unified and what stays bespoke.
• You'll develop principled frameworks for when the system should hold the line and when a brand's unique voice warrants something purpose-built – and you'll be a credible, evidence-based advocate for both sides of that argument.
• Expression here means the full user experience: typography that makes long-form reading a pleasure, interactions that feel effortless across reading, watching, and play, ad experiences that don't undermine editorial trust, and accessibility that ensures great content reaches everyone.
• Leading through craft, not just process. This is a player‑coach role: you'll be in the work when it matters, in reviews, in critiques, and occasionally in the details, because that's how you set the standard and build the capability of those around you.
• You'll know when to get close and when to step back, and you'll use both to grow your team.
• You'll lead the forums, rituals, and culture that make craft excellence the norm, not the exception.
• Bringing technical depth and forward-looking thinking. You'll bring genuine technical fluency across front-end technologies, design systems, and component architecture.
• You'll understand the implications of design decisions at the platform level and care deeply about what those decisions mean for the reader's actual experience: Core Web Vitals, load times, ad rendering, and the p95 user who isn't on a fast connection with a new device.
• You'll partner closely with your Product and Engineering counterparts to ensure design and technology strategy are tightly aligned, not just coordinated.
• You're energized by building in complexity – you've led design through significant change before and know how to create momentum and confidence in a team while the ground is shifting.
• You're a genuine player‑coach: you lead through others, but you're not above getting into the details, and your team knows the difference between your involvement being a signal of support and a signal of concern.
• You have deep craft instincts – for typography, systems, interaction, and the reading experience – and you hold the line on quality even under pressure.
• You think across the system and the story simultaneously: you understand that a great design system exists to enable brand expression, not constrain it.
• You have a real, working relationship with AI tools – not as a talking point, but as part of how you actually design and lead.
• You're fluent in multi‑brand complexity: you've worked across genuinely different editorial cultures within a shared platform, and you have principled views on governance and flexibility.
• You operate through influence and clarity, not authority – you're as comfortable in a conversation with a CTO as with a junior designer, and you build trust quickly across both.
• You're resilient and low‑ego – you can navigate ambiguity, absorb pressure, and keep your team steady without pretending everything is fine.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience leading platform‑level, systems‑oriented design – including design systems, component libraries, or shared publishing tooling – with a track record of shipping at scale across multiple brands or product lines.
• Deep technical fluency: front‑end architecture, design tokens, component design, theming systems, accessibility, and performance trade‑offs at a level that earns genuine credibility with engineering partners.
• A hands‑on, evolving relationship with AI tooling – someone who has already changed how they work because of it, and is actively curious about what changes next.
• A sophisticated understanding of typography, narrative structure, visual storytelling, and the particular design challenges of publishing products.
• Demonstrated ability to lead as a player‑coach: setting standards through doing, raising the craft of those around you, and building team capability through proximity to the work.
• Experience leading design teams through significant change or organisational flux – building confidence and momentum while the environment is shifting.
• Proven ability to attract, develop, and grow senior design talent, including emerging people managers, across a global and distributed organisation.
• Comfort thinking about org design: how to structure a team, where to specialise, how to evolve the team shape as the portfolio grows.
• A principled, clear‑eyed approach to the tension between platform unification and brand expression – with experience making and defending these calls in complex multi‑brand environments.
• Fluency in the commercial dimensions of a publishing platform – subscriptions, advertising, loyalty – sufficient to inform and partner credibly with Product leadership on strategic decisions.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and storytelling skills – able to influence senior stakeholders and technical partners alike, and build alignment across competing priorities.
• Experience leveraging OKR frameworks to connect design direction to measurable business outcomes.
• Experience working in media, publishing, or content‑led consumer products.
• Experience working in large global organisations with distributed teams across multiple time zones.

Benefits

• 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.