Design Lead

Design Lead

We're quickly growing and super excited for you to join us!

Topsort is changing the way Retail Media works. By joining our scaling team, you'll feel your impact from day 1. The processes and messaging you build today will be a critical part of our foundation as we accelerate toward 200 Topsorters worldwide, and your innovations will leave a lasting mark on the industry, as a whole. Retail Media is on the verge of a new era, and Topsort is gathering the ecosystem together to shape a brighter future. Joining us now, you'll work directly alongside our co-founders and founding members to bring on Retail Media 3.0. If you're looking to define your career as something greater than yourself, come scale with us.

Our team is all about straightforward communication, embracing feedback without taking it personally, and fostering a super collaborative environment. It's a sports team that's hyper focused on winning, collaborative internally, and competitive externally - never the other way around. We thrive on working in the open, lifting each other up, and getting things done with a sense of urgency. We're the kind of team that loves making bold choices, sharing extraordinary opinions, and maintaining a 100 mph pace. No endless meetings here – if it can be done today, we're all about getting it done today.

We're looking for a creative, hands-on, and cross-functional Design Lead to own and elevate design at Topsort across both product and brand. This role is perfect for someone who can zoom between pixels and systems, detail and direction, and who's excited to shape the visual identity of a fast-growing adtech company from the ground up.

You'll set the quality bar, and work directly with product, marketing, and leadership to ensure our user experiences are not only functional, but elegant and cohesive. You'll guide everything from feature-level UI/UX to brand campaigns and visual storytelling, making sure Topsort looks and feels like the category-defining product we're building.

This is a high-impact, hands-on role for a designer who's ready to lead, ship, and scale, and who thrives in early-stage, product-led environments.

You will:

• Lead and evolve Topsort's design function, spanning both product UX and brand design
• Work hands-on in Figma to create intuitive, delightful user experiences for our platform, APIs, and tools
• Define and maintain a cohesive design system that balances speed, scalability, and craft
• Mentor and support a small team of designers, fostering collaboration and growth
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, marketing, and go-to-market teams to align design decisions with business goals
• Translate complex concepts (auctions, APIs, data flows) into clear, user-friendly interfaces and communications
• Shape and refine Topsort's visual identity across touchpoints—from the app to the website to event collateral
• Balance speed with precision, making smart trade-offs in a fast-moving, startup environment
• Champion design quality and usability, helping the team think in systems, not just screens

What (we think) you need to be successful - we're open to not checking all the boxes and be proven wrong by outlier candidates as well!

• 6+ years of experience across product design and brand/visual design, with a strong portfolio that demonstrates both
• Experience designing and shipping complex digital products, ideally in B2B, SaaS, or technical domains
• Comfortable working with and leading a small team, including mentoring, direction-setting, and feedback
• Fluent in tools like Figma and comfortable owning systems, prototypes, and design documentation
• Strong understanding of interaction design, layout, and visual hierarchy
• Able to think and speak cross-functionally, working with engineers, marketers, and execs alike
• A builder's mindset: you seek feedback, move quickly, and focus on delivering impact
• A passion for clarity, simplicity, and polish in every design decision
• Excitement about owning a zero-to-one design journey and influencing company-wide aesthetics and UX
• Been located in Boston and available to work onsite from our Somerville office 4 days a week onsite.

At Topsort, we believe in the mission of democratizing the secret technologies of the walled gardens and creating a privacy-first cookie-free world of clean advertising with modern tech, friendly products, and AI. We believe in making advertising intuitive, intelligent, and genuinely cool, without any of the creepy ads or cookie-obsession (well, maybe just the chocolate ones). In a rapidly changing industry, we're on a mission to democratize monetization access for all and ensure that advertising doesn't leave any brand or seller feeling confused or overwhelmed

Today, Topsort has 5 major hubs worldwide, and employees in 13+ countries, including Menlo Park, Boston, Santiago Chile, Sao Paulo Brazil, Barcelona Spain, and Sydney Australia. We are a truly global company that was born in the pandemic that's had rapid growth since out of a genius product, a customer-first mentality, and a hardworking team of talented individuals. Since our founding in 2021, we've gained customers in retail, marketplaces, and delivery apps in 40+ countries and quickly approaching the #1 position in the industry.

Do you enjoy a fast-paced environment? Do you like seeing your work create real-time impact, being part of a rocket ship from the very beginning? Let's do the unimaginable - let's make ads clean and cool again, with AI and modern technology.

What We Value

• Deep dive into details: Professionals who are not content with superficial answers and dive deeply into the details to uncover root causes and optimal solutions.
• Team first: A low need for individual recognition, always prioritizing collective results over personal credit.
• You thrive with ambiguity: Exceptional ability to tackle open-ended problems in unstructured environments, turning chaos into structured innovation.
• Adaptability: Willingness to learn, mentor, lead, and follow as the situation demands, fostering growth at all levels.
• Urgency: A disproportionate sense of urgency in execution, while keeping scalability and the creation of replicable processes in mind to ensure long-term success.
• Curiosity: Genuinely curious individuals who can quickly learn difficult concepts and apply them effectively.

Do you sound like the right fit? Let's dive right in!