Design Leadership Jobs in United Kingdom
Find your next Design Leadership role at companies that value creative talent
Showing 142 jobs
Design Manager
🇬🇧 City of London, London, United Kingdom
Wates Group 🇬🇧 City of London, London, United Kingdom
Lead and coordinate design across multiple social housing planned works, refurbishment, and retrofit projects, ensuring deliverables are compliant, buildable, accurate, and issued on schedule. Manage design programmes, consultants, risks, meetings, and value engineering while supporting pre-construction, procurement, and safe project delivery.
Design Manager
🇬🇧 City of London, London, United Kingdom
Wps 🇬🇧 City of London, London, United Kingdom
Lead and coordinate design across multiple social housing planned works, refurbishment, and retrofit projects, ensuring design information is compliant, buildable, accurate, and delivered on programme. Manage consultants and design risks, coordinate with operational and commercial teams, support pre-construction and tenders, and promote safe, cost-effective design and continuous improvement.
Design Manager - Hospitality Interiors
🇬🇧 Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom
Gleeson Recruitment Group 🇬🇧 Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom
Lead and develop an in-house design team while managing hospitality refurbishment, development, and interior fit-out projects from concept through delivery. Approve design schemes and technical documentation, maintain brand consistency, coordinate with internal and external stakeholders, and improve the design function.
Senior Design Manager
🇬🇧 Suffolk, England, United Kingdom
Dragados Uk & Ireland 🇬🇧 Suffolk, England, United Kingdom
Manage, coordinate, integrate, and assure the multidisciplinary design for West Suffolk Hospital, ensuring it meets contractual requirements and is safe, buildable, operational, and maintainable. Lead the design team and supply chain, develop and implement design management plans, coordinate design packages and interfaces, and provide assurance of compliance.
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Design Manager (Steel Fabrication)
🇬🇧 Leicester Forest East, Leicestershire, England, United Kingdom
Ernest Gordon Recruitment 🇬🇧 Leicester Forest East, Leicestershire, England, United Kingdom
Produce design drawings and models using Tekla for projects including structural steel frames, secondary support steel, staircases, balustrades, and bespoke architectural metalwork. Coordinate with internal and external teams, manage project documentation, ensure designs meet quality and regulatory requirements, and attend occasional site visits.
Senior Design Manager
🇬🇧 Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Russell Taylor Group 🇬🇧 Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Manage design phases from pre-construction through on-site delivery, leading design teams and chairing meetings. Work directly with clients and oversee complex or high-value construction projects.
Head of Design
🇬🇧 Leeds, England, United Kingdom
Stars 🇬🇧 Leeds, England, United Kingdom
Lead and develop a multidisciplinary design team while setting the agency’s creative vision and standards across web, digital marketing, brand, campaigns, and performance creative. Provide senior creative direction for major projects and pitches, collaborate across agency departments, strengthen client relationships, and improve the design function’s processes and capabilities.
Head of Design
Remote (🇬🇧 Leeds, England, United Kingdom)
Fynity Remote (🇬🇧 Leeds, England, United Kingdom)
Lead the multidisciplinary Design function, setting creative standards and providing strategic direction across UX/UI, digital products, brand, campaigns, and motion. Develop the team and oversee resourcing, budgets, client partnerships, pitches, cross-functional collaboration, and improvements to creative processes.
Design Manager
🇬🇧 Filton, South Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom
Rowden 🇬🇧 Filton, South Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom
Lead product direction and roadmap, translating customer and end-user needs into requirements and priorities. Deliver hardware products from concept through production while managing teams, cost, schedule, quality, technical and supply-chain risks, and customer relationships.
Senior Design Manager
🇬🇧 Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England, United Kingdom
Costain Group Plc 🇬🇧 Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England, United Kingdom
Manage design delivery for water projects on the Northumbrian Water AMP8 Framework, including design partners, project teams, contracts, deliverables, programmes, and budgets. Ensure compliant, safe, buildable, and carbon-efficient designs through design reviews, risk and assurance processes, BIM strategy implementation, and coordination with framework and project stakeholders.
Design Manager
Remote (🇬🇧 Workington, Cumberland, England, United Kingdom)
Rullion Remote (🇬🇧 Workington, Cumberland, England, United Kingdom)
Manage design delivery to schedule and budget, including design reviews, stage gates, construction reviews, and risk-reduction procedures. Provide technical support and ensure health, safety, environmental, and quality considerations are integrated into design, while coordinating reviews and deliverables with clients, external parties, and project teams.
Senior Design Manager
🇬🇧 Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England, United Kingdom
Costain Group 🇬🇧 Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England, United Kingdom
The Senior Design Manager is responsible for the design delivery of water projects on the Northumbrian Water AMP8 Framework. This includes managing design partners, ensuring compliance with standards, and coordinating design risks and technical reviews.
Design Manager
🇬🇧 Weybridge, Surrey, England, United Kingdom
Strabag Uk 🇬🇧 Weybridge, Surrey, England, United Kingdom
Lead and coordinate design throughout the project lifecycle, managing deliverables, assurance, progress, risks, and interfaces with clients, consultants, subcontractors, and internal teams. Support tender and project delivery through safe, practical, economical designs, team leadership, design reviews, and compliance with company procedures and applicable standards.
Senior Design Manager
🇬🇧 Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Strabag Uk 🇬🇧 Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Lead design management across complex construction projects from pre-construction through completion, ensuring designs are safe, compliant, buildable, sustainable, and commercially effective. Manage design processes, deliverables, assurance, progress reporting, consultant interfaces, team performance, and tender-stage design while identifying and mitigating risks.
Primary Design Manager
🇬🇧 Stafford, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
Ge Vernova 🇬🇧 Stafford, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
Lead and coordinate global engineering teams to deliver high-quality primary plant designs for HV/EHV substation projects. Ensure compliance with regulatory standards and project requirements while providing technical leadership and mentoring to junior engineers.
About Design Leadership careers
Design leaders in 2026 set the strategic vision for design organizations navigating an AI-saturated market. This role requires a balance of craft expertise and high-level business acumen to advocate for design's value at the executive level.
Effective leaders foster a culture of technical agency, establishing systems that allow human creativity and machine efficiency to coexist.
Companies like Stripe and Airbnb seek VPs and Directors of Design who can scale teams and align design strategy with long-term business objectives.
We feature senior leadership positions including Design Directors, Heads of Design, VP of Design, Chief Design Officers, and design team leads at companies like Meta, Google, Airbnb, Stripe, and fast-growing AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. These roles span product design, brand, and cross-functional design organizations.
Many companies offer remote design leadership roles, including distributed-first companies like Notion, Linear, GitLab, and Vercel. AI companies like Midjourney and Anthropic also hire remote design leaders. Some companies prefer hybrid arrangements for VP+ positions.
Most positions require 8–15+ years of design experience with 3–5+ years managing teams. Strong candidates demonstrate strategic thinking, team building, stakeholder management, and a track record of shipping successful products at companies like Figma, Spotify, Netflix, or emerging AI startups. Browse leadership portfolios to see how experienced designers showcase their impact.
Design leadership salaries are highly competitive: Design Directors earn $160k–$240k, VPs of Design $220k–$350k+, and CDOs at major companies can exceed $400k with significant equity packages. AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks often offer premium total compensation. Consult our salary guide for detailed breakdowns.