Condé Nast
Product Design Lead, Puzzles & Games
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Condé Nast is a global media company producing the highest quality content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers in 32 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company’s portfolio includes many of the world’s most respected and influential media properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Self, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit and Wired, among others.
Job Description
Location:
London, GB
Condé Nast thrives on collaboration, and our teams come together in the office four days a week (Monday - Thursday).
We value diversity of background, views and cultures. We celebrate people for their personal qualities, skills and contributions, recognising the power our brands have to influence and shape culture.
The Opportunity
The New Yorker's Puzzles & Games offering is one of the most distinctive — and fastest-growing — corners of our digital portfolio. From the iconic crossword to newer games, it's a space where editorial personality, interaction design, and habit-forming product thinking all converge. Getting it right is genuinely hard and genuinely exciting.
We're looking for a Product Design Lead to help us evolve and expand this offering: building on our existing portfolio, concepting new games, and creating a deeper ecosystem that drives habit, reward, and loyalty for our brands’ users. This is a senior IC role with real creative scope — you'll work with autonomy, move at pace, and shape something that millions of people engage with every day.
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 you'll be doing...
Elevating and growing the game's experience. You own the design quality of the Puzzles & Games portfolio, optimising what exists, concepting what comes next, and building a habit-forming ecosystem around it. You bring a sophisticated understanding of gameplay mechanics, reward cycles, and the moments of delight that keep players coming back. You think as much about the ecosystem as the individual game: how touchpoints connect, how habits form, and how loyalty is built over time. Interrogating the brief, not just answering it. You ask "why this?" before "how." You connect feature work to the wider player experience and business opportunity, 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. Mastering interaction, motion, and feedback. You're an expert in the craft that makes games feel alive, micro-interactions, motion, feedback states, and the precise timing that separates a satisfying experience from a frustrating one. You understand how every tap, transition, and animation contributes to the emotional texture of play, and you hold the bar high on all of it. Knowing your player deeply. You dig into data and research to understand what games players 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. Designing a connected ecosystem. You think beyond individual games to the wider experience: onboarding, streaks, rewards, social moments, and the journeys that turn a casual player into a loyal one. You connect the dots across the portfolio, ensuring that touchpoints build on one another rather than existing in isolation. 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 collaboration, not just artefact management. Using AI as part of your practice. You use AI tools as a working part of how you design — for rapid prototyping, generative exploration, and closing the gap between concept and execution. You're not waiting to see what best practice looks like; you're helping to define it. Owning outcomes, not just outputs. You treat the experiences you design as products, not deliverables. You track how your work performs — using player data, retention metrics, and qualitative feedback to identify what to improve next. You operate with a founder-level sense of accountability for the quality and performance of what ships. Partnering across disciplines. You build trusted relationships across design, editorial, product, and engineering. You speak the language of Creative Directors and engineers with equal fluency, and you translate the brand’s editorial personality into interaction systems and game experiences that feel unmistakably right for the brand. Championing design culture. You model craft, curiosity, and clarity through your work. You set the standard for what "good" looks like, mentor through example, and help raise the collective bar, not just within your team, but across the wider design organisation.
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You'll thrive in this role if…
You have a genuine love for puzzles and games - you understand what makes them compelling, habitual, and worth coming back to You care deeply about the role design plays in building loyalty and emotional connection, not just usability You're an expert in interaction, motion, and feedback - you have strong instincts for the details that make play feel satisfying You move easily between the individual moment and the wider ecosystem, understanding how they connect You're someone who interrogates briefs, questions assumptions, and brings a point of view - not just someone who executes what's asked You're technically fluent: comfortable in Figma, Cursor / Claude and GitHub, familiar with design tokens and front-end constraints, and able to engage engineers at the implementation level You've already changed how you work because of AI tools, and you're curious about what changes next You're outcome-oriented - you care about engagement, retention, and habit formation, not just how the work looks in a review You're a strong communicator: direct, open, and as comfortable receiving feedback as giving it You're a self-starter who doesn't need the path fully defined to move with confidence
What success looks like...
In your first six months, you'll have built a perspective on the opportunities within puzzles and games, and established the cross-functional trust needed to move fast: with product, engineering, and editorial, and you'll have started to introduce new ways of working, including AI-assisted methods, that raise the pace and quality of the team's output.
By the end of your first year, you'll have launched at least one game, and evolved others, with clear evidence of impact: engagement numbers and a demonstrable contribution to our loyalty metrics. You'll be a well-trusted, respected member of the team, someone people turn to. You'll have a considered, well-grounded point of view on the longer-term direction of Puzzles & Games, and the relationships to advocate for it. The new ways of working you introduced will be embedded, not experiments, but how the team operates.
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What we'd like to see
We're looking for evidence that you can apply design craft, judgement, and systems thinking to real, interactive experiences. Your portfolio should show:
Interaction and motion craft - examples of how you design for gameplay, feedback states, transitions, and micro-interactions that create delight and satisfaction Ecosystem thinking - how you've connected multiple features and moments to drive outcomes; how user touchpoints build on one another to create a wider experience Brand sensitivity - how you interpret and express a brand's identity and voice across interactive experiences and touchpoints Editorial and games experience - direct puzzles and games experience is preferred but not required; we're looking for someone who can create genuinely delightful interactive moments for our brands Implementation quality - evidence that your design intent carried through to production; how you've worked with engineers or used tools (Figma, configs, tokens) to protect fidelity Visual judgement - confident hierarchy, rhythm, motion, and composition, with a clear point of view on what "great" looks like Curiosity and progression - signs that you stay current, experiment with new tools and technologies (including AI), and push your craft forward Experience - 5+ years in product or interaction design roles.
About Condé Nast Technology
Condé Nast Technology builds the products, systems, and experiences that power our brands — from Vogue and The New Yorker to GQ, Wired, and Vanity Fair. Our mission is to enable creativity and business growth through next-generation publishing, loyalty, and commerce platforms.
We're a global team of designers, engineers, product managers, and researchers, working across London, New York, and twelve other markets. We believe that a well-formed design culture is essential to delivering excellent products — and we're actively investing in building one.
Does this sound like you?
Please submit your CV and cover letter/portfolio, which highlights why you'd love to take on this role and why you're a great match for what we're looking for.
We value the time and effort behind every application. All submissions are reviewed by a member of our talent team - we don’t use AI-assisted technology to review applications.
What benefits do we offer?
25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) and extra days of annual leave if you move house or want to volunteer. You’ll have access to a competitive pension scheme, Bupa Private Healthcare, Season ticket loans and eye tests. We offer a range of tools to support your wellbeing, including core hours, 10 remote days (from home or a country with a Condé Nast office location), access to our Employee Assistance Programme, corporate gym membership and cycle to work scheme. We’re a dog-friendly office, plus you’ll enjoy discounts and magazine subscriptions, keeping you up to date with all things Condé Nast. We encourage personal and professional growth through the Condé Nast Learning Hub, where you’ll find an extensive portfolio of learning courses and training available in local languages. Our Employee Resource Groups provide a platform for employees to identify shared objectives, exchange ideas, and work on community priorities for our global workforce.
What happens next?
If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below, and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile.
Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.
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