Design Taste Lead

Role overview

This role owns the scoring function that decides whether shipped work reads as considered and on-brand or as competent and generic. The position sits inside a design team at a remote-first US company and is responsible for setting visual direction across a fleet of brands before wireframes exist. The work blends design leadership with hands-on critique, curating reference material and shaping the automated checks that gate what the team releases.

Responsibilities

- Own the taste critic and the brand DNA locks that gate what the fleet ships - Review work against the critic and refine the critic when its judgment disagrees with yours and yours is right - Curate the reference library that trains team judgment, kept typed, sourced, and legally clean - Set visual direction for new brands before any wireframe is drawn - Push back on work that passes every automated gate but is still not good enough

Requirements

- A portfolio that shows visible restraint and real range across work - Ability to articulate what is wrong with a design specifically enough that the critique becomes a rule - Comfort working inside an existing design system and extending it rather than starting over per project - Strong, defensible opinions about typography and hierarchy

Nice to have

- Front-end skills sufficient to change a design rather than annotate it - Brand identity work - Motion and interaction design

Benefits and work setup

- Remote-first with US-timezone overlap - Lead-level base salary of $130,000 to $170,000 plus 0.3% to 0.7% equity