Design Team Lead - Ecommerce Marketing Agency

The Design Team Lead runs the day to day work of our Design Team. There are two sides to it. One is craft, which means keeping the standard of the design work high across every client we serve. The other is people, which means keeping the team organised, supported, and able to do good work without getting stuck.

Most of what the team produces is email and SMS campaign design for ecommerce brands, along with ad images, GIFs, short video edits, and the occasional landing page. You will still design yourself, but the larger part of the job is making sure what goes out is right. You are the person who spots what is not working in a design before the client does, and who explains the fix in a way a designer can act on straight away.

You will work closely with Account Managers, who assign the day to day tasks, and with the designers who carry them out. A good deal of the role sits between those two groups: helping an Account Manager work out what a campaign actually needs, turning that into clear direction for a designer, and saying so when a request does not make sense.

The Design Team Lead reports to the Service Director, and works closely with the other departments at Hustler Marketing to make sure design work is delivered well and on time.

About the Role:
Mission statement:

To keep the quality of our design work at a level clients notice, and to run a team that is organised, well briefed, and heard.
The first half of that is craft. Reviewing work, spotting what is weak in a design, and giving direction that makes it better. The second half is people. Distributing the week, reorganising it when something changes, and making sure the team's ideas and concerns reach someone who can act on them. We already have a strong team here, independent and reliable. What they need from a lead is someone who listens properly and comes back with a real answer.

General Responsibilities:

Design quality and direction

• Reviewing the team's design work before it reaches Account Managers or clients, and giving feedback specific enough to act on
• Diagnosing why a design is not working, whether that is hierarchy, contrast, the weight of the call to action, the balance of image to text, or how it holds up on mobile, and writing the fix down clearly
• Advising Account Managers on what a campaign needs visually, and pushing back when a brief is thin or a request will not serve the client
• Designing directly when the workload calls for it. This is a hands-on role, not a purely supervisory one
• Keeping the work consistent across a wide range of client brands, niches, and visual identities
• Setting and holding the design standards for email and SMS campaigns, ad images, GIFs, and short video assets
• Understanding each client's visual brand identity well enough to advise on ideas, improvements, and optimisations

Running the week

• Distributing and organising the team's workload week by week, working from the tasks Account Managers assign
• Reorganising the queue quickly when priorities change, someone is unavailable, or a client adds something at the last minute
• Keeping track of who is overloaded and who is not, and rebalancing before it turns into a missed deadline
• Being the first person the Design Team comes to when something is blocking their work
• Making sure the design targets set for each client account are met

The team

• Running the Design Team's group calls and regular one-to-ones
• Collecting the team's suggestions and concerns, taking them seriously, and coming back with an answer, including when the answer is no
• Mentoring designers and helping the less experienced members build their skills
• Onboarding new designers into how we work
• Connecting Design with the other service teams through workshops, short tutorials, and written documentation
• Running training and skill-building sessions for the Design Team

Process and improvement

• Noticing where a workflow, a handoff, or a piece of communication is costing the team time, and fixing it
• Writing and maintaining the documentation the team works from
• Keeping up with what Figma ships and bringing the useful parts into how the team works
• Staying current on design and email marketing trends, and sharing what matters rather than everything
• Bringing industry best practices back to the Service Director and to the team
• Taking on projects and initiatives delegated by the Service Director

Position Specs:

• Full-time commitment while meeting our general availability for office hours
• An average of 140 tracked hours per month, consistently
• Fixed-rate monthly salary paid in USD
• Contractor status after signing our non-disclosure agreement
• Exclusivity agreement, meaning you cannot hold a position of a similar nature elsewhere while working for Hustler Marketing
• A 30-day notice period after the first month
• Performance reviews every 9 to 12 months, with the first one after 3 to 6 months

Requirements

About you:

Profile:

You are a senior designer with at least five years behind you, and a portfolio of real client work across different brands and niches rather than a handful of personal projects. At least three of those years involve email marketing design.

You are expert in Figma. Not comfortable in it, expert. You should be able to build and maintain component libraries, and it helps if you follow what Figma releases closely enough to tell the team when something new is worth adopting. Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity is a useful complement, though we do not lean on either heavily.

You know more than one kind of design output. Email and SMS campaign design is the core of it, but ad images, GIFs, and short video edits come up constantly. Some basic knowledge of web design is a plus rather than a requirement, since landing pages appear from time to time and the team already handles most of that themselves.

What matters most is your eye, and how you talk about it. You can look at a design that is not performing and say what is wrong with it, in what order, and what you would change first. Then you can put that in a message a designer understands without needing a follow-up call. That skill is most of this job.

You are organised enough to run a week of work across several people, and to rearrange it at short notice without the whole thing falling apart.

You are the sort of person a team talks to. Ours is independent and reliable, and there are a few things they would like to see improved that are hard to change quickly. What matters to them is knowing their comments are being considered and answered, not that every one of them gets a yes.

You are curious. You notice when a process could be better and you do something about it instead of working around it. You bring people together across teams with workshops, documents, and tutorials without waiting to be asked.

And you notice detail, in your own work and in everyone else's.

Key traits for this position:

Strong visual judgement, and the vocabulary to explain it. Organised, and calm when the week changes shape. Approachable, and willing to have the honest conversation rather than the easy one. Curious about tools and trends without chasing every new thing. Detail-oriented past the point of comfort. At ease working remotely with people spread across several countries and 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 building and working from component libraries
• Working knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity
• Experience producing ad images, animated GIFs, and short video edits
• An established portfolio showing on-brand, effective design work for a range of clients, stores, and niches
• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating other designers. A formal lead title is not required, but you should have done the work
• The ability to review someone else's design work and give written feedback that is specific and actionable
• The ability to distribute and reorganise a team's weekly workload, including at short notice
• A basic understanding of web design and landing pages is a plus
• Experience with Klaviyo, or with a comparable email marketing platform, is a plus
• Comfortable with Slack, Asana, Hubstaff, Google Workspace, and Figma, and willing to learn whatever else we use
• Fluent written and spoken English. It does not need to be your first language, but you will be writing feedback and running calls in it every day
• Remote work experience, ideally with a team spread across time zones
• Available and responsive during office hours, Monday to Friday between 3 and 6 PM Barcelona time
• Consistently working 30 to 35 hours per week, which is 140 hours per month
• A stable internet connection, a laptop or PC, and the ability to join video calls