Lead Product Designer

Location: The Adelphi, London, GB

Condé Nast is one of the world's most renowned media publishing companies, creating and distributing every type of media today, spanning print and digital publishing in all formats. With a portfolio of some of today's most influential brands, the company continues to grow its audience through a global operational and content infrastructure across its 12 owned and operated markets. Headquartered in New York City, the company's owned and operated markets include China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico & Latin America, Spain, Taiwan, UAE/Dubai, the U.K., and the U.S., with additional local license partners in over twenty additional markets across the globe.

Lead brands include Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, Condé Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, Wired, Allure, Ars Technica, Bon Appétit, House & Garden, Pitchfork, Tatler, and Vogue Business.

Location

London, GB

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, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit and Wired, among others.

We are headquartered in New York and London and operate in 32 markets worldwide, with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers across print, digital, video and social platforms.

Condé Nast thrives on collaboration, and our teams come together in the office four days a week (Monday - Thursday).

WIRED is one of the world’s most distinctive editorial voices. Bringing that distinctiveness to life across web and our recently launched app, at the quality and precision the brand demands, is an exciting design challenge.

We’re looking for a Product Design Lead to join us for nine months covering maternity leave. This is a senior individual contributor role, with real autonomy to continue rapidly evolving WIRED’s digital product offering and make a tangible difference to its audience experience.

You’ll work through already defined problem spaces and partner across disciplines to identify new ones, taking work from discovery through to launch. You’ll combine visual craft, systems thinking and product judgement to build on the team’s progress, challenge assumptions and deliver meaningful improvements.

Your primary focus will be WIRED across web and app, with opportunities to contribute to wider projects within Audience Experience.

What you’ll be doing

Elevating visual quality You own the visual standard of WIRED’s digital experience, ensuring every layout, interaction and detail feels deliberate, considered and right for the brand. You bring a sophisticated eye for typography, hierarchy, rhythm and composition.

Interrogating and shaping the brief You ask “why this?” before “how.” You connect feature work to the wider audience experience, identify gaps and help define new problem spaces alongside product, engineering, editorial and business partners. You identify opportunities to integrate revenue-generating experiences without compromising brand integrity, and propose a better framing when a brief needs it.

Designing with and within systems You champion design excellence within a shared system, while knowing where to push beyond it. You balance brand expression with scalability, using components consistently and purposefully while creating the moments of distinctiveness that make WIRED feel like itself across web and app.

Knowing your audience, deeply You dig into data and research to understand what WIRED’s audiences do, need and feel. You run lightweight research and usability testing to pressure-test ideas and prototypes, and partner with UX Research and Analytics specialists to go deeper where it matters. You bring that understanding into every design decision.

Closing the gap between design and delivery You work closely with engineering throughout implementation, staying involved to ensure design intent carries through to production. You’re fluent in design tokens, comfortable reading a pull request, and use Figma and GitHub to collaborate throughout delivery.

Using AI as part of your practice You use AI tools for rapid prototyping, generative exploration and closing the gap between concept and execution. You bring judgement about where these tools improve the work and share useful approaches with the team.

Owning outcomes You take work from defined problems through exploration, validation and launch. You track how it performs using audience data, analytics and qualitative feedback, and use that learning to inform what happens next. You’re accountable for the quality of what ships.

Partnering across disciplines You build trusted relationships across design, editorial, product, engineering, marketing and revenue teams. You speak the language of Creative Directors and engineers with equal fluency, translating editorial and creative ambition into actionable product improvements.

You’ll thrive in this role if…

• You have a love for editorial design and storytelling, and a strong instinct for what makes a compelling digital experience.
• You move easily between system and brand thinking, knowing where shared components create coherence and where a brand’s voice warrants something purpose-built.
• You’re comfortable designing across web and app, recognising where experiences should be consistent and where they need to respond to the platform.
• You interrogate briefs, question assumptions and bring a point of view.
• You’re technically fluent: comfortable in Figma, AI-assisted design and prototyping tools, and GitHub; familiar with design tokens and front-end constraints; and able to engage engineers at the implementation level.
• You care about how the work performs as well as how it looks.
• You’re a strong communicator, as comfortable receiving feedback as giving it.
• You can get up to speed quickly in an established team, understand the context behind existing decisions and move work forward with confidence.

What success looks like

By the end of your first two months You’ll have developed a clear understanding of WIRED’s audiences, web and app experiences, design system and roadmap. You’ll have built strong working relationships, agreed priorities with your partners and are moving work forward.

During You’ll deliver agreed improvements across WIRED’s digital experience, maintaining a high standard of craft from concept through launch. Alongside progressing defined priorities, you’ll help identify and validate new opportunities with cross-functional partners. Research, audience feedback and performance data will inform your decisions and show the impact of the work.

By the end of your time with us You’ll have delivered meaningful improvements against the agreed priorities and left ongoing work in a clear, actionable state. Design decisions, research findings, performance learning and recommended next steps will be documented, supporting a smooth handover to the returning lead.

What we’d like to see

• We’re looking for evidence that you can apply design craft, judgement and systems thinking to real products. Your portfolio should show:
• Editorial and content-led design: storytelling, hierarchy and content-rich journeys, ideally within digital publishing or media.
• Brand sensitivity within systems: how you express a brand within shared frameworks, and where you’ve pushed beyond them.
• Web and app experience: how you respond to different platforms, behaviours and interaction patterns.
• Motion and interaction: transitions, scroll behaviour, feedback states and interactions that make reading and navigating feel effortless.
• System fluency: how you’ve refined or extended design systems, component libraries or token configurations.
• Implementation quality: how you worked with engineers to carry design intent through to production.
• Visual judgement: confident hierarchy, rhythm, composition and a clear point of view.
• Impact and adaptability: how you understood a problem, worked within its constraints and delivered improvements.
• Experience: 5+ years in product or editorial design roles.

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.

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.

What happens next?

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below, and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile.

Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.