Freelance UX Design Lead

A creative-forward agency is seeking a Freelance UX Design Lead to lead experience design across a premium client portfolio spanning hospitality, real estate, and luxury beauty. This is an open engagement with strong potential to extend.

Let's be direct: this is a maker role as much as it is a leadership one. We need someone who can own the strategy and do the work, someone equally at home facilitating a client discovery session and pushing pixels in Figma. You'll work closely alongside creative, development, and account teams to produce digital experiences that are as conversion-smart as they are craft-driven.

The clients we serve operate in spaces where the experience is the product. The way a guest moves through a booking flow, the digital presence of a high-end property brand, the launch moment for a prestige skin & haircare label, UX isn't a layer on top of the work here, it's woven through it. We're looking for someone who feels that distinction in their bones and can execute against it at every level of fidelity.

What you'll do

• Own UX vision and direction across concurrent client engagements spanning product/digital, brand experience, and service design
• Lead and execute the full UX arc yourself: stakeholder and customer research, competitor analysis, journey and service mapping, information architecture, interaction and visual design, prototyping, and validation
• Shape end-to-end thinking for omni-channel experiences where digital, physical, and content touch points all need to hang together
• Partner with creative directors, strategists, developers, and account leads to deliver integrated thinking, not UX in a silo
• Translate research and insight into strategic recommendations and polished design assets that land with senior clients
• Integrate AI tools across the UX workflow, research synthesis, usability testing, rapid prototyping, content iteration, design QA to move faster without cutting corners on quality
• Present and defend work to C-suite stakeholders with clarity and confidence
• Contribute to new business: pitch concepts, capability narratives, proposals
• Mentor designers across the team and raise the craft bar across the studio

What we're looking for

• 12–15 years of UX, product, and experience design, with meaningful time at senior/director level at agencies or design consultancies, not just in-house
• A strong agency pedigree is essential. We're looking for people who've navigated fast-moving, multi-client environments, managed competing priorities, and shipped work under real constraints.
• You must be comfortable doing the work yourself. This role does not have a large team underneath it. You'll be a maker and a leader, often on the same day
• A portfolio weighted toward premium and lifestyle brands, with demonstrable work in at least one of our core categories: hospitality, real estate, or luxury beauty. Adjacent premium work (fashion, wellness, spirits, hospitality tech, private members' clubs, luxury retail) all relevant
• Case studies that show strategic thinking and executional follow-through the why behind the decisions and the work you personally produced
• Fluency across the full toolkit: user research, IA, service and journey design, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, design systems, accessibility (WCAG a plus)
• Hands-on fluency with AI tools across the UX process: research and synthesis (ChatGPT, Claude, NotebookLM, Dovetail AI, etc.), usability and prototype testing (Maze, UserTesting AI, Attention Insight), design and ideation (Figma AI, Galileo, Uizard, v0), and workflow automation
• Proven ability to run discovery, facilitate workshops, and turn messy insight into clear direction independently
• A sharp eye for visual craft. In these categories, "functional" isn't enough
• Confident communicator and storyteller, comfortable in the room with founders, CMOs, and C-suite
• Collaborative, adaptable, and low-ego. This is a team sport
• Established freelancer or contractor with your own setup (insurance, invoicing, the admin side handled)

Nice to haves

• Experience designing booking, membership, or loyalty flows in hospitality
• Familiarity with the buyer journey for premium residential or branded residences
• Prior work on luxury beauty DTC, product launches, or content-led commerce
• Track record supporting new business pitches: concepting, presenting, winning
• A point of view on where AI is genuinely changing UX practice and where it's noise