Design Team Lead

The Design Team Lead oversees the day-to-day operations of the Design Team, balancing two key aspects: maintaining high design standards across all client work and ensuring the team remains organized, supported, and efficient.

The team primarily creates email and SMS campaign designs, ad images, GIFs, short video edits, and occasional landing pages. While you will still design, the core responsibility involves ensuring the final output is accurate and effective. You will identify design flaws before clients notice them and provide clear, actionable feedback to designers.

You will collaborate closely with Account Managers, who assign tasks, and with designers executing those tasks. This role acts as a bridge between Account Managers and designers, clarifying campaign requirements, providing direction, and pushing back on impractical requests.

The Design Team Lead reports to the Service Director and works with other departments to ensure design work is delivered on time and to a high standard.

About the Role:

Mission statement: To uphold the quality of design work to a level that clients notice, and to lead a team that is organized, well-briefed, and heard. The first half focuses on craft—reviewing work, identifying design weaknesses, and providing constructive direction. The second half focuses on people—managing workloads, adapting to changes, and ensuring team input is considered and acted upon. The team is already strong, independent, and reliable; they need a leader who listens and provides genuine, practical answers.

General Responsibilities:

Design quality and direction:

• Reviewing the team’s design work before it reaches Account Managers or clients, providing specific feedback for actionable improvements
• Diagnosing design issues—such as hierarchy, contrast, call-to-action weight, image-to-text balance, or mobile responsiveness—and documenting clear fixes
• Advising Account Managers on visual campaign requirements and pushing back on vague or ineffective briefs
• Designing directly when workload demands, ensuring hands-on involvement beyond supervision
• Maintaining consistent design standards across diverse client brands, niches, and visual identities
• Setting and enforcing design standards for email/SMS campaigns, ad images, GIFs, and short video assets
• Deeply understanding each client’s visual brand identity to advise on ideas, improvements, and optimizations

Running the week:

• Distributing and organizing the team’s workload weekly, based on Account Manager assignments
• Quickly reorganizing priorities when changes occur, team availability shifts, or last-minute client requests arise
• Monitoring workload balance to prevent overload and missed deadlines
• Serving as the first point of contact for the Design Team when work is blocked
• Ensuring design targets for each client account are met

The team:

• Facilitating Design Team group calls and one-to-one meetings
• Collecting and addressing team suggestions, concerns, and feedback—including when the answer is no
• Mentoring designers and helping less experienced members develop their skills
• Onboarding new designers to the team’s workflow and processes
• Fostering collaboration between Design and other service teams through workshops, tutorials, and documentation
• Organizing training and skill-building sessions for the Design Team

Process and improvement:

• Identifying inefficiencies in workflows, handoffs, or communication and implementing fixes
• Creating and maintaining team documentation
• Staying updated on Figma updates and adopting useful features for the team
• Tracking design and email marketing trends, sharing relevant insights without overwhelming the team
• Bringing industry best practices to the Service Director and team
• Taking on projects and initiatives delegated by the Service Director

Position Specs:

• Full-time commitment with adherence to office hours availability
• Average of 140 tracked hours per month, consistently
• Fixed-rate monthly salary paid in USD
• Contractor status post-signing of a non-disclosure agreement
• Exclusivity agreement prohibiting similar roles elsewhere while employed
• 30-day notice period after the first month
• Performance reviews every 9–12 months, with the first review after 3–6 months

Requirements

About You:

You are a senior designer with at least five years of experience, featuring a portfolio of real client work across diverse brands and niches—not just personal projects. At least three of those years should be in email marketing design.

You are an expert in Figma, comfortable building and maintaining component libraries, and stay updated on Figma releases to suggest relevant improvements. While Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity is useful, it is not heavily relied upon.

Your expertise spans multiple design outputs: email/SMS campaigns, ad images, GIFs, and short video edits. Basic web design knowledge is a plus, as landing pages occasionally appear.

The most critical skill is your ability to critique designs objectively—identifying flaws, prioritizing fixes, and communicating them clearly to designers without follow-up calls.

You are highly organized, capable of managing a team’s workload across multiple people and adapting quickly to changes without disruption.

You are approachable, prioritizing honest conversations over easy ones. You are curious, proactive in improving processes, and skilled at bridging teams through workshops, documentation, and tutorials. Detail-oriented and comfortable working remotely with a globally distributed team.

Key Traits:

Strong visual judgment with the ability to articulate it. Organized and calm under changing priorities. Approachable and willing to have difficult conversations. Curious about tools and trends without chasing every new development. Highly detail-oriented and adept at remote collaboration across time zones.

Key Requirements:

• At least 5 years of experience as a graphic designer, with a minimum of 3 years in email marketing design
• Expert-level Figma skills, including component library management
• Working knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity
• Experience producing ad images, animated GIFs, and short video edits
• Portfolio showcasing on-brand, effective design work for varied clients
• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating designers (formal lead title not required)
• Ability to review designs and provide specific, actionable written feedback
• Capacity to distribute and reorganize weekly team workloads, including last-minute changes
• Basic understanding of web design and landing pages (a plus)
• Experience with Klaviyo or comparable email marketing platforms (a plus)
• Familiarity with Slack, Asana, Hubstaff, Google Workspace, and Figma; willingness to learn other tools
• Fluent written and spoken English (not necessarily a first language)
• Remote work experience, ideally with a globally distributed team
• Availability and responsiveness during office hours (3–6 PM Barcelona time, Mon–Fri)
• Consistent 30–35 hours per week (140 hours/month)
• Stable internet connection, laptop/PC, and video call capability