Design & Front-End Lead

The Role

As a Lead Designer, you'll play a central role throughout the entire project — establishing the design strategy, delivering it with code, and ensuring that our work has the intended business impact.

• Lead teams and engage clients through the entire project.
• Plan and run a design process that delivers on core business goals.
• Design solutions that unlock opportunities for teams and clients.
• Explain decisions, win over stakeholders, and fulfill the creative strategy.
• Navigate complex business, user, and team needs with empathy.
• Develop your design in HTML / CSS and ship impeccable work.

Last but not least: People who succeed here are empathetic teammates who are candid, kind, caring, and embody our core values. We believe that diverse, inclusive teams make the most impactful work. Upstatement is deeply invested in ensuring that we have a supportive, growth-oriented environment that works for everyone.

Why Upstatement?

Upstatement is a digital product studio with an editorial mindset. We use the tools of design, engineering, and journalism to enrich lives and create a more just society. Our 50-person team works with established leaders (MIT, ESPN, PBS) and emerging companies who are about to change the world.

• Work with ethical and mission-driven organizations.
• Collaborate in a high-trust environment that empowers creative ownership.
• Build a portfolio you can be proud of.
• Blossom in a small studio culture full of top talent and peers who help you grow.
• Find your path at a place that prizes flexibility: We encourage experimentation, support role switching, and help people balance between maker/manager and lead/support.
• Contribute to a progressive, values-driven culture that has deep commitment to DEI, puts people first, and believes in making each other better.
• Experience true life-work balance with a 4-Day Work Week.
• Surround yourself with other designers who code. Our process centers designer-coders because it's how we've worked since day one. You’ll get lots of support from engineers, designers, and managers who know where you’re coming from.

What You'll Do

• Lead an end-to-end design process. Contribute visual ideas as research. Express strategic ideas through design. Communicate the rationale behind your work. Make it beautiful, and (most important) deliver what users need.
• Establish a brand vision that is informed by research, connected to business outcomes, and driven by you. Present to clients with support from the team.
• Conduct research. Run workshops, participate in user interviews, and gather inputs throughout the process. Design new activities as goals dictate.
• Explore complex problem spaces with an open mind. Feel comfortable with ambiguity. Generate multiple solutions, rapidly iterate, and make strategic product decisions in partnership with a team.
• Sweat the details. Impeccable execution and deep care given to all aspects of design, large and small: strategy, messaging, brand, colors, typography, icons — everything.
• Communicate clearly. Share daily status with teams. Deliver concepts to clients. Talk through thorny issues as they arise. Show excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills that build strong relationships.
• Love (and evolve) the process. Follow established practices and invent new ones. Evolve our process to be more thoughtful, effective, and accessible to all.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture where people feel productive, creative, and safe. Be unafraid to name problems and move toward solutions with optimism, clarity, and calm.

About You

• 3-7+ years of hands-on design and front-end development leadership at a digital agency.
• World-class visual and interaction designer with a portfolio of work demonstrating business impact across products and websites.
• Proven ability to express strategy through design, synthesizing research — interviews, workshops, competitive audits — that result in impactful design executions across a wide range of audiences and industries.
• Expert at breaking down complexity and understanding each client’s business context. A systems thinker who actively works to identify the big opportunity. Clearly articulates the why behind every decision.
• Demonstrates craft by manifesting design with code, specifically HTML, CSS, and some Java