Lead Product Designer, The New Yorker

About the role

The New Yorker is one of the most distinctive editorial brands in the world. Bringing that distinctiveness to life online, at the quality and precision the brand demands, is one of the most interesting design challenges in digital publishing right now. We're looking for a Product Design Lead who sits at the intersection of system and story: someone who can take what we've built and make it measurably better, through focus, craft, and an instinct for what "great" actually looks like. This is a senior IC role. You'll work with real autonomy, move at pace, and make a tangible difference to the experience of millions of readers. But this isn't just an execution role. We're in a period of deliberate transformation - in how we build, how we design, and how we use new tools and technology to raise our bar. We need someone who is part of how we move forward: a change agent who brings conviction, curiosity, and craft in equal measure. What will you be doing? Elevating visual quality You own the visual standard of the New Yorker's digital experience - ensuring every layout, interaction, and detail feels deliberate, considered, and unmistakably right for the brand. You bring a sophisticated eye for typography, hierarchy, rhythm, and composition, and you know the difference between work that functions well and work that genuinely feels great. Interrogating the brief, not just answering it You ask "why this?" before "how." You connect feature work to the wider reader experience, identify gaps that others miss, and elevate the ambition of the work beyond the initial ask. You're comfortable pushing back on a brief when the framing isn't right, and proposing a better one. Designing with and within systems You champion design excellence within the parameters of a shared system, while knowing exactly where to push beyond it. You balance brand expression with scalability - ensuring component use remains consistent and purposeful, while creating the moments of distinctiveness that make the New Yorker feel like itself online . Knowing your reader, deeply You dig into data and research to understand what New Yorker readers actually do, need, and feel - not just what they say. You run your own lightweight research and usability testing to pressure-test ideas and prototypes, and you partner closely with our UX Research and Analytics specialists to go deeper where it matters. You bring this understanding into every design decision, and you're as comfortable in a research debrief as you are in a design review. Closing the gap between design and delivery You work closely with engineering at the implementation layer, not just handing off, but staying close to ensure design intent carries through to production. You're fluent in design tokens, comfortable reading a pull request, and use Figma and GitHub as tools of genuine collabora