Lead Product Designer, The New Yorker in London

Condé Nast is a global media company producing the highest quality content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers in 32 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company’s portfolio includes many of the world’s most respected and influential media properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Self, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit and Wired, among others.

Location: London, GB

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: Condé Nast Technology builds the products, systems, and experiences that power our brands — from Vogue and The New Yorker to GQ, Wired, and Vanity Fair. 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, working across London, New York, and twelve other markets. We believe that a well‑formed design culture is essential to delivering excellent products — and we’re actively investing in building one.

About Our Design Team: 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.

The Role: The New Yorker is one of the most distinctive editorial brands in the world. Bringing that distinctiveness to life online, at the quality and precision the brand demands, is one of the most interesting design challenges in digital publishing right now.

We’re looking for a Product Design Lead who sits at the intersection of system and story: someone who can take what we’ve built and make it measurably better, through focus, craft, and an instinct for what “great” actually looks like. This is a senior IC role. You’ll work with real autonomy, move at pace, and make a tangible difference to the experience of millions of readers.

What will you be doing?

• Elevating visual quality: You own the visual standard of the New Yorker’s digital experience — ensuring every layout, interaction, and detail feels deliberate, considered, and unmistakably right for the brand.
• Interrogating the brief, not just answering it: You ask “why this?” before “how.” You connect feature work to the wider reader experience, identify gaps that others miss, and elevate the ambition of the work beyond the initial ask.
• Designing with and within systems: You champion design excellence within the parameters of a shared system, while knowing exactly where to push beyond it.
• Knowing your reader, deeply: You dig into data and research to understand what New Yorker readers actually do, need, and feel.
• Closing the gap between design and delivery: You work closely with engineering at the implementation layer, not just handing off, but staying close to ensure design intent carries through to production.
• Using AI as part of your practice: You use AI tools as a working part of how you design, for rapid prototyping, generative exploration, and closing the gap between concept and execution.
• Owning outcomes, not just outputs: You treat the experiences you design as products, not deliverables.
• Partnering across disciplines: You build trusted relationships across design, editorial, product, and engineering.
• Championing design culture: You model craft, curiosity, and clarity through your work.

Who you are:

• 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’ll thrive in this role if…

• You have a genuine love for editorial design and storytelling.
• You’re technically fluent: comfortable in Figma, Cursor / Claude and GitHub.
• You’ve already changed how you work because of AI tools.
• You’re outcome-oriented — you care about how the work performs, not just how it looks in a review.
• You’re a strong communicator: direct, open, and as comfortable receiving feedback as giving it.
• You’re a self-starter who doesn’t need the path fully defined to move with confidence.

What success looks like: In your first six months, you’ll have made a measurable improvement to the quality of The New Yorker’s digital experience. By the end of your first year, that improvement will be visible in the metrics that matter: quality, engagement, and reader loyalty.

Experience: 5+ years in product or editorial design roles.

What benefits do we offer? 25 days holiday.