Design Lead – Brand & AI-Driven Growth in London

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.

What You’ll Own

• Brand and visual system: 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.
• The website: 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).
• Campaign and collateral output: 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.
• The AI-powered production model: 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.
• Manage a team of three: 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.

What We’re Looking For

• Must-haves: 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).
• Craft: 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.
• Management at distance: 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.
• Commercial instinct: 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.
• Speed and nerve: Default to shipping, learning, and iterating. Make decisions with imperfect information and keep momentum. Hold quality under pressure.

Desirable: 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.

How We Expect You To Behave ❤️ We embrace differences and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this: A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all. Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together. Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question. No egos - people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely.

What Makes Working Here Better: 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.