Lead Designer

Lead Designer Hybrid -4x a week in our London officeAbout UsAt Simmer, we're building the future of healthy, high-flavour, feel good eating. With tens of thousands of subscribers and a mission to make better food easier for everyone, we're scaling fast, and we're just getting started. Number 5 in the Sunday Times’s fastest growing companies, we’re backed by impressive growth, an engaged community, and a product that makes healthy eating accessible for everyone, even those with no time.As we scale our brand presence and digital experience, we're looking for a Lead Designer who will own and elevate our entire design practice. You'll be responsible for defining our visual identity, creating exceptional digital experiences, and ensuring every piece of creative work reinforces who we are as a brand. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll spend significant time designing alongside strategic thinking, while also managing our junior designer.You will be instrumental in helping us shape how our customers discover, understand, and connect with us across every touchpoint enabling us to shape a brand design language that’s instantly recognisable, culturally relevant, and crafted to the highest level. This is a role for someone who sees both the big picture and the fine grain, who obsesses over the details that make design sing.What You'll OwnBrand Strategy & IdentityYou'll refine and evolve the Simmer Eats brand to ensure it resonates with our target audience and stands out in a crowded market. This means making strategic decisions about our visual language, tone, and how we position ourselves. You'll create and maintain brand guidelines that give us consistency while allowing for creative flexibility. You'll ensure our brand feels cohesive whether someone encounters us on social channels, our website or a billboard.Design Systems & OperationsYou'll build the infrastructure that allows us to scale design efficiently. This includes creating component libraries and design systems in Figma, establishing design processes that integrate smoothly with product and marketing workflows, selecting and managing design tools and vendors, and documenting best practices so quality remains high as we grow.Website Design & UX/UIYou'll own the strategy, design, and continuous optimization of our digital experience. This means designing our website to create a seamless journey from discovery to purchase, establishing clear information architecture so customers can intuitively find products, learn about our story, and understand what makes us different. You'll design interfaces that work beautifully across mobile, tablet, and desktop, ensuring our experience is responsive and feels native to each device.You’ll work closely with our development team, ensuring designs are implemented with precision, providing detailed specs, interactive prototypes, and being available to answer questions during build. You'll establish a culture of continuous improvement by running A/B tests on key pages and features, monitoring site performance and user feedback post launch, and iterating based on what you learn.Every design decision you make will balance aesthetic excellence with measurable business impact, creating an experience that feels distinctly Simmer Eats while driving conversion, retention, and customer satisfaction.Performance Advertising Art DirectionYou'll provide creative direction and oversight for our static advertising across paid social, display, and other digital channels. While our junior designer executes these ads day to day, you'll establish the creative frameworks, review and approve their work, and ensure ad creative balances brand integrity with performance goals. You'll help them understand what makes effective performance creative and develop their skills over time. You'll help them understand that performance creative requires different thinking than brand campaigns, it needs to work in a cluttered feed, communicate value instantly, and drive specific actionsOOH DesignYou'll conceive and design our presence in the physical world through tube ads, billboards, and other OOH formats. This means creating bold, attention grabbing creative that communicates our brand in seconds, adapting our visual system for large scale formats and varying viewing distances, and understanding how OOH fits into our broader marketing strategy. Team LeadershipYou'll directly manage our junior designer, providing regular feedback, helping them grow their craft, and ensuring their output meets our standards. As we scale, you'll help define our hiring needs and build the design team.What You BringExperience & Skills4-6+ years of design experience with a strong portfolio demonstrating expertise across branding, web design, UX/UI, and advertising. You've worked in environments where you owned multiple aspects of a brand's creative output simultaneously. You deeply understand brand strategy and can articulate how visual identity connects to business positioningHighly proficient in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite. Solid understanding of responsive web design, user-centered design principles, and how to design for both brand impact and conversion. Experience managing or mentoring designers and can give feedback that develops talent. You can present and defend creative work to stakeholders, incorporating feedback while maintaining creative vision. Mindset & AttitudeStrategically minded but execution obsessed.Thrive with autonomyComfortable with ambiguity.Strong opinions about design but able to hold them loosely when data or feedback suggests a different directionHow to ApplySend us your portfolio along with a brief note about:Why Simmer Eats interests you specificallyWhich 2-3 projects in your portfolio best demonstrate your ability to handle this role's breadth