Senior Design Director, Publishing Platform

Location:

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.

This is a rare opportunity to define the foundational design layer of some of the world's most storied media brands - and to do it at a moment when what "platform design" means is genuinely changing.

The Publishing Platform group sits at the heart of how Condé Nast's brands are built, expressed, and experienced at scale. It spans our design system, component library and templates, editorial tooling and CMS. The work here enables every brand, from The New Yorker to Vogue to Wired, to move with greater creative confidence and coherence, and to deliver experiences that are faster, more beautiful, and more meaningful for the users they serve. Get it right, and the effect is felt across everything.

We're looking for a Senior Design Director who is both a rigorous systems thinker and a deeply craft-led leader: someone who understands that great platform design isn't just about efficiency, but about enabling expression. This is a player-coach role. You'll lead a team of senior ICs and some emerging leads, but you'll be in the work alongside them when it matters, setting the standard through doing as much as directing.

This is also a role for someone who is energised by change, not unsettled by it. The team, the platform, and our ways of working are all evolving - and this person will help shape what they evolve into.

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• You're energised 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

In your first six months, you'll have built the trust and understanding needed to form a clear, well-grounded point of view on how the foundations of our platform need to evolve, in order to deliver user experiences deserving of our world-class brands, and you'll have started acting on it, with early, measurable improvements to show.

By the end of your first year, that point of view will be in motion. The quality bar of our user experiences will be visibly higher, the team will be working in new ways, and the organisation will be aligned around a shared vision for what this platform is becoming.

• 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

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.

Please submit your CV and cover letter/portfolio, which highlights why you'd love to take on this role and why you're a great match for what we're looking for.

We value the time and effort behind every application. All submissions are reviewed by a member of our talent team - we don’t use AI-assisted technology to review applications.   

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.