Design Lead

Why this role exists

Before anyone reads a word we write, they have already formed an opinion of us from how we look.

Every month, Conveo ships hundreds of pieces of visual work: the website, landing pages, sales decks, films, social posts, event booths, reports that land on the desks of executives at Unilever, Google, and Orange. That work is made by many hands, internal people, external partners, freelancers, and increasingly AI agents. What is missing is the one person who owns what it all adds up to.

That is this role. You hold the visual language of the entire company: what Conveo looks like, why it looks that way, and how every team, from marketing to sales to events to the founders themselves, produces work that looks like it came from the same brain. When a buyer decides in three seconds whether we look like a company they can trust with their biggest questions, they are judging your work.

The timing is the once-in-a-career part. We are rebuilding the entire brand this year, with a funded rebrand agency, a funded freelance bench, and a green field behind them. Most design leads inherit an identity and spend years defending it. You arrive at the moment ours gets created, and you decide what it becomes.

There is one more thing that makes this seat unusual. Conveo runs on AI agents: they draft, produce, and publish across marketing and sales every day. Your design system will be executed by people and by machines. When you encode a rule well, our agents apply it on every asset, at any hour, at a volume no design team could match. You may be the first design lead anywhere whose taste ships through an agent workforce. If teaching machines your eye excites you rather than threatens you, keep reading.

The Context

Marketing here runs as a film-studio. A small senior core holds taste, project teams are cast from a funded freelance network, and AI agents carry production volume. Design work also flows through external partners: one for content visuals, one for the product design system, and the incoming rebrand agency. The seam between all of them needs a single owner. You are that owner, and you own it the way the best do: from the work.

You report to the CMO, who is the single approver for marketing, so decisions happen in one conversation. You partner daily with the Head of Video Content, the Product Marketing Manager, our events lead, sales, and the external design partners.

Your Mission
1. Be the visual brain of the company

One cohesive, distinctive vision, originating from the brand system, applied everywhere by everyone.

• Shape the visual vision for Conveo and hold it across web, landing pages, decks, social, events, video, sales collateral, and product marketing
• Make the vision legible: anyone in the company should be able to say what Conveo looks like and why
• Govern the seam between our content partner, the product design system partner, and the rebrand agency so one language survives across product and brand
• Review inbound work against the system and send back what misses, with reasons
• Keep the character intact as volume grows: warm stone ground, single accent, serif headlines, real photography, generous whitespace

2. Steward the visual identity, hands on

An identity is only as strong as the weakest asset that ships under it, so the steward works from inside the work: tightening the hierarchy of a deck an hour before it lands in a Fortune 500 room, rebuilding a landing page hero, redrawing a diagram until it explains itself, fixing the template so the mistake never happens again. You will do this daily, across every surface, and it is where your taste becomes the company's taste.

• Own the bar on everything that ships. In practice that means daily hands-on work: an asset lifted from fine to excellent, a deck rebuilt, a crop fixed, a page tightened
• Fix things at the source. When you correct something twice, the third fix goes into the template, the component, or the rule, so the whole system inherits it
• Take the ad hoc work that keeps a fast company moving. When sales needs something tonight and the bench is busy, you build it, fast and at full quality, and enjoy that this is part of the job rather than an interruption to it
• Make the references. The fastest way to communicate taste to a freelancer or an agent is an example you made yourself
• Stay in the tools weekly. Figma, Framer, decks, motion direction, claude code, whatever the surface demands

3. Turn your taste into a system that scales through people and AI agents

This is the multiplier, and the part of the role that makes it new. Your eye, encoded, executed by humans and machines.

• Build and maintain the marketing design system: tokens, components, templates, asset library, usage rules
• Encode the rules so agents can execute them: prompts, skills, and machine-readable guidelines for Claude and Claude Code, so on-brand assets get produced without your hands on the file
• Treat the system as a product with users: marketing, sales, agents, freelancers. Ship it, version it, improve it from how it gets used
• Write briefs and rules precise enough that a freelancer you have never met, or an agent, returns something usable on the first pass
• Measure yourself on leverage: how much on-brand work ships each week that you never touched

4. Enable every team, and direct the bench

You make everyone around you faster. Marketing, sales, events, founders. Enabler is the posture; bottleneck is the failure mode.

• Give sales, events, and marketing self-serve paths: templates and systems that make the on-brand version the easy version
• Cast, brief, and direct freelance designers, motion designers, editors, and illustrators from the funded network envelope
• Run a regular critique rhythm so quality is a habit rather than a rescue, and communicate taste in words people can act on
• Decide what gets killed. Rejecting good-but-wrong work quickly, with reasons, keeps the bar real

5. Rebuild the brand, then make it stick

A full identity rebuild is funded and starting now. You own it end to end, from concept through to every surface it has to live on.

• Act as our design counterpart to the rebrand agency, from first playback through final delivery, pressure testing what will survive contact with real surfaces
• Design the signature visuals that explain Conveo: the diagrams, flagship pages, and hero assets that make what we do instantly clear, and easy for other people to retell
• Plan and execute the identity rollout across web, landing pages, decks, events, video, and collateral, protecting brand equity and organic search through the switch
• Translate the delivered identity into a working production system that our bench and our agents can use on day one, so the rebrand is a beginning rather than an event

6. Make design a measurable growth lever

Design here is accountable to outcomes across the funnel, and it gets measured.

• Design purpose-built landing pages and funnels per segment, industry, and named account
• Feed the experiment cadence with variants, then read the results and act on them
• Art direct video with the Head of Video Content: compositing, framing, captions, endcards, so a film is recognisably ours in the first two seconds
• Report creative performance learnings back into the system, so the brand gets sharper from what the market rewards

What We're Looking For
Must-haves

• 4+ years in brand, marketing, or visual design, with work you personally made that clears a very high craft bar, plus real experience directing others
• A portfolio where the strongest pieces are yours and the system around them is also yours: you build the work and the machine that produces more of it
• You have made your taste executable at least once: templates, rules, briefs, or prompts that let other people produce work you would sign
• Ships in the real stack. Figma plus Framer, decks, and whatever the surface actually is. You deliver finished, live work
• Editorial typographic craft and photo direction. Type, grid, and photography carry your work
• Fluency in motion and compositing direction: you can specify how a film is built and hold an editor to it
• AI already central to how you produce, and genuine curiosity about pushing it further: agents, Claude Code, generative tooling as part of the system rather than a party trick
• Comfortable being measured. You have shipped performance creative, seen your favourite version lose a test, and shipped the winner

Mindset

• Enabler first. Your instinct when sales needs a deck tonight is to make the system handle it, and to build it yourself when the system is young
• Generous with taste. You can explain why something works in words a freelancer, a founder, or an agent prompt can act on
• Systems instinct. Your first question about any one-off is what it implies for the next fifty
• High agency, low ego. The brand matters more than personal authorship
• Speed as a craft value. You would rather ship three good things this week than one perfect thing next month
• Taste you can defend with reasons, and change when the reasons are better

Nice to have

• Prototyping or building in code, Framer or React
• Hands-on experience with Claude Code, agent workflows, or programmatic asset generation
• Brand photography commissioning and shoot direction
• Event, booth, and print experience. Events carry the majority of our marketing budget
• B2B, research, or enterprise software background

What Success Looks Like
After 6 to 12 months:

• Everything Conveo publishes looks like it came from the same company, including work produced by three external partners and a fleet of AI agents
• Your fingerprints are on most of what ships, even where your name is not: people across the company can point to work you lifted from fine to excellent, and to templates that got permanently better because you touched them once
• A documented design system exists, is used by people and agents, and gets updated because everyone relies on it
• An agent can produce an on-brand asset from your system without you touching the file, and it passes your own review
• Sales and events self-serve for standard assets; nobody in the company is waiting on you to make something on-brand
• A bench of 4 or more trusted freelancers produces at your bar, with brief to live under 10 working days
• The rebrand is live across web, decks, events, and video, with brand equity and organic performance intact through the switch
• Purpose-built funnels outperform the homepage, and design is a named contributor to the drop in cost per acquisition