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 focuses on designing email and SMS campaigns for ecommerce brands, along with 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, helping clarify campaign needs, translating them into clear design directions, and pushing back on requests that may not serve the client.

The Design Team Lead reports to the Service Director and works closely 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 well-organized, effectively briefed, and heard. The first half of this mission is about craft: reviewing work, identifying design weaknesses, and providing direction to improve it. The second half is about people: managing the workload, adapting to changes, and ensuring the team’s ideas and concerns are addressed.

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 necessary, 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 and SMS campaigns, ad images, GIFs, and short video assets
• 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 distribution to prevent overload and missed deadlines
• Serving as the first point of contact for the Design Team when issues arise
• Ensuring design targets for each client account are met

The team:

• Facilitating Design Team group calls and regular one-to-ones
• Collecting and addressing team suggestions and concerns, providing clear answers (including when the answer is no)
• Mentoring designers and helping less experienced members develop their skills
• Onboarding new designers to the team’s workflow
• Fostering collaboration between Design and other service teams through workshops, tutorials, and documentation
• Conducting training and skill-building sessions for the Design Team

Process and improvement:

• Identifying and resolving inefficiencies in workflows, handoffs, or communication
• Writing and maintaining team documentation
• Staying updated on Figma features and integrating useful updates into team workflows
• 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 general office hours
• An average of 140 tracked hours per month
• Fixed-rate monthly salary paid in USD
• Contractor status post non-disclosure agreement signing
• Exclusivity agreement, prohibiting similar roles elsewhere while employed
• 30-day notice period after the first month
• Performance reviews every 9 to 12 months, with the first review after 3 to 6 months

Requirements

About you:

Profile:

You are a senior designer with at least 5 years of experience, showcasing a portfolio of real client work across diverse brands and niches—not just personal projects. At least 3 years of this experience should be in email marketing design.

You are an expert in Figma, comfortable building and maintaining component libraries, and staying updated on Figma releases. Knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity is beneficial, though not heavily relied upon.

Your expertise spans multiple design outputs, with email and SMS campaign design as the core focus. Ad images, GIFs, and short video edits are also part of the workload. Basic web design knowledge is a plus, given the occasional landing page project.

The ability to critique designs effectively is critical: identifying flaws, prioritizing fixes, and communicating them clearly to designers without follow-up calls. Organizational skills are essential for managing a team’s workload and adapting to changes.

You are approachable, willing to have honest conversations, and proactive in improving processes. Detail-oriented and comfortable working remotely with a globally distributed team.

Key traits for this position:

Strong visual judgment with the ability to articulate it. Organized and calm under pressure. Approachable and committed to honest communication. Curious about tools and trends without being overly trend-driven. 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
• An established portfolio demonstrating on-brand, effective design work for varied clients
• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating other designers (formal lead title not required)
• The ability to review designs and provide specific, actionable written feedback
• The ability to distribute and reorganize a team’s weekly workload, including last-minute changes
• Basic understanding of web design and landing pages is a plus
• Experience with Klaviyo or a comparable email marketing platform is a plus
• Comfortable with Slack, Asana, Hubstaff, Google Workspace, and Figma, with a 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 (Monday to Friday, 3–6 PM Barcelona time)
• Consistent work of 30 to 35 hours per week (140 hours per month)
• Stable internet connection, laptop or PC, and video call capability