Creative Design Lead

At OakNorth, we're on a mission to empower ambitious businesses and the communities they serve. Since 2015, we've lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while driving economic growth in the markets we serve.

As OakNorth continues to grow across multiple products and customer segments, design becomes a direct lever on outcomes: it improves understanding and trust, raises conversion, and increases adoption across our journeys. Marketing and brand design is how we turn strategy into a coherent, high-performing set of experiences, ensuring every touchpoint is on-brand, measurable, and built to move commercial performance.

The role is a hybrid manager + IC role. You’ll lead a team of three in India, but you’ll also be in the work, setting the taste bar by example, designing the highest-stakes pieces yourself, and running critique with the authority that only comes from still doing the craft.

This role drives the visual expression of OakNorth across every surface a customer, prospect, saver, or partner touches before they meet the product: brand, website, campaigns, collateral, ads, sales enablement, and event design.

• Evolve OakNorth’s brand and visual system across every external touchpoint globally.
• Raise the craft bar and consistency (type, layout, imagery, motion) while keeping the brand unmistakably OakNorth.
• Turn brand principles into repeatable assets: templates, guidelines, components, AI-driven, and examples teams can use.

• Lead end-to-end design for the website (IA, page design, component library, and governance).
• Partner with Marketing and Product to improve performance (conversion, clarity, and journey drop-offs).
• Establish a measurement + iteration loop (hypotheses, tests, learnings, rollouts).

• Drive high-impact design: ads, landing pages, social, sales decks, investor materials, and event/environmental design.
• Build scalable systems so output stays fast without sacrificing quality (kits, modules, and reusable layouts).
• Ensure every “moment that matters” ships on time, on brand, and with clear success metrics.

• Build an AI-enabled production pipeline that increases throughput without increasing review debt.
• Enable non-designers with templated systems and clear approval gates.
• Deliver a step-change in asset velocity to scale designs impact across surface areas.

• Set the bar on quality.
• Lead a team based in Gurugram, India: ops, hiring, growth, performance, and succession.
• Run an operating model that works across time zones (async handoffs, weekly crit, clear quality bar).
• Contribute to a growing design community at OakNorth by sharing standards, tooling, and craft across product, brand, and marketing.
• Drive efficiency and focus across the team, ensuring time is spent on high-impact work by reducing low-value production through systems, templates, and AI-enabled workflows.

• An exceptionally high taste bar in brand and marketing design, and the willingness to set it by example.
• Significant experience in brand and/or marketing design, including at least 2 years leading or managing designers.
• Experience managing a distributed team across multiple time zones.
• Hands-on experience deploying AI tools inside a live production pipeline (e.g., Firefly, Flora, Figma AI, or equivalent), with measurable impact on throughput, time-to-asset, or revision cycles.
• Demonstrated ability to evolve and improve a brand system (not just maintain it) across web, campaigns, and collateral.
• Track record of tying design work to commercial outcomes (conversion, engagement, brand lift, or sales enablement velocity).

• Lead-level brand craft: typography, layout, composition, restraint, and production-quality execution.
• Shipped across formats in tight cycles (homepage design, campaign creative, sales decks, event assets).
• Evolved a brand system while keeping consistency high, not just “policing” it.

• Managed a distributed team across time zones, including async critique and structured handoffs.
• Coached and levelled up designers while protecting a high craft bar.
• Run hiring, performance, and succession.

• Partnered directly with Marketing, Product, and other stakeholders on priorities and trade-offs.
• Used data to set direction, make decisions, and defend recommendations.
• Translated brand and design choices into measurable business impact.

• Default to shipping, learning, and iterating.
• Make decisions with imperfect information and keep momentum.
• Hold quality under pressure.

• Experience in fintech, banking, or another regulated industry a significant plus.
• Built and maintained prompt libraries, templates, and brand guardrails inside an AI-enabled production pipeline.
• Measured workflow impact (time-to-asset, revision cycles, throughput) and iterated based on data.
• Experience scaling a brand system to support new product launches or market expansion.

• This is a truly hybrid role, offering the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value.
• There’s no fixed requirement for days in the office, instead, we focus on creating space for engineers to engage meaningfully, whether that’s in-person for whiteboarding sessions or remote for deep focus work.
• Work-life balance – 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
• Competitive salary.
• Good kit – Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS.
• Team socials – The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
• Company socials – A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts, lunches and dinners on OakNorth – or at our free barista bar every day.
• Commuter support – We offer the cycle to work and EV scheme.