Brand Design Lead

Critical Playground LLC; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible vacation policy

Private Healthcare

Employee stock ownership (ESOP)

Flexible working and autonomy

Pay it forward days

Wellness days

Job summary

Lorum is hiring a Brand Design Lead to own and elevate our brand identity and visual systems. This hands‑on role requires crafting cohesive brand assets, applying the language across external surfaces, and ensuring credibility for regulated institutional clients.

You’ll collaborate with marketing, sales, and product to maintain consistency, guide freelancers, and create clear design specs for engineers and partners. This is a hybrid London role.

Qualifications

• 6+ years hands‑on design experience with strong portfolio in brand systems.
• Experience building brands in scale‑up environments.

Responsibilities

• Inherit and evolve the brand foundation, creating a cohesive visual identity.

Skills

Brand design

Design systems

B2B tech branding

Figma

Visual identity

Storytelling

Tools

Figma

HTML/CSS

Job description

This is a hybrid role that requires 4 days/week in our London office (Fitzrovia)

About Lorum

The structural conflict at the centre of correspondent banking is not technological. It is economic. Banks earn revenue from their balance sheets: they lend deposits, capture FX spreads, and hold funds as long as it is rational to do so. Clearing, the act of releasing funds quickly and predictably, competes directly with those economics. An institution designed to lend has a structural incentive to hold deposits; an institution designed to clear has an incentive to release them. When one institution does both, clearing loses. The result is unpredictable settlement, trapped capital, and a correspondent network shrinking by design.

Why Lorum

Lorum was founded on a different premise: clearing as the business, not a byproduct. The model has been operational since 2023 and grew 55x in 2025, with USD clearing now the majority of volumes alongside a growing treasury offering. We have applied for a U.S. national trust bank charter. The people we hire now will build the clearing and treasury infrastructure it unlocks.

The role

Lorum should look and feel like the defining correspondent institution for banks. The substance is in the model, the regulation and the volumes. The brand should say so before anyone reads a word, and getting that right is one of the highest-leverage things we can do over the upcoming months.

We're looking for a Brand Design Lead to own our brand identity and visual systems. This is a hands-on role, where you will personally design and build cohesive, distinctive brand assets and apply that visual language consistently across every external surface.

Our clients are regulated financial institutions. Everything you design needs to communicate precision, credibility, and institutional quality. This is not consumer fintech.

Day-to-day responsibilities

• Inherit and systematize Lorum's existing brand foundation, then evolve the visual identity: logos, typography, colour, iconography, imagery, and brand guidelines.
• Design and produce our on-brand marketing assets: website pages, decks, social, events, and sales collateral.
• Build and maintain a scalable design system and component library.
• Ensure all visual output communicates the precision and credibility expected by regulated institutional clients, and hold that line when something is not good enough to ship.
• Take work all the way to shipped, not to handover. That means assets exported, hosted, built, and live, without production work landing on someone else.
• Work closely with marketing, sales, and product to make sure the brand shows up consistently wherever clients encounter us.
• Direct freelance and agency support where it helps, so your own time goes to the work that needs you.
• Create clear design specifications and documentation for engineering and external partners.

Success in the first 6 months

• A clear point of view on the brand: what needs to change for an institutional audience, and what you have already started changing.
• Major external work designed and owned end to end by you, from brief through to live, with review as approval rather than production.
• The brand system evolved and documented well enough that non-designers can produce simple collateral without you.
• Working directly with sales, product, and the CEO, and bringing proposals rather than waiting for briefs.

Ideal Candidate

Must Haves

• 6+ years of hands-on design experience, with a strong portfolio of work of you designed yourself,demonstrating craft across visual identity, brand systems and marketing.
• Experience building and evolving brands within a scale-up environment.
• A strong background designing for B2B tech, with a clear understanding of how design builds trust and credibility.
• Evidence of independently designing and delivering work from concept through to launch.
• Proficiency in Figma for design, prototyping and collaboration.
• Experience building or maintaining design systems and component libraries.
• Confidence working from imperfect briefs, challenging assumptions and shaping the right solution.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to articulate design decisions to stakeholders.

Nice to haves

• Experience in fintech, payments or regulated industries, ideally designing for institutional audiences where trust and credibility are essential. It speeds up ramp, but we will not trade craft for it.
• Basic front-end knowledge (HTML/CSS) to create newsletter designs.
• Experience with motion design or advanced prototyping.
• Some product UI experience, for the occasions where brand and interface meet.
• Fluency with AI-assisted design tooling. Useful, not a substitute for craft.
• Where this is not the right role
• If you have moved into managing designers and away from making things.
• If you'd rather set direction and review work than design it yourself.
• If you want a mature brand to maintain rather than a system to define.
• If you need a brief to be complete before you can start.

Benefits

• Flexible vacation policy
• Private Healthcare
• Employee stock ownership (ESOP)
• Flexible working and autonomy
• Pay it forward days - we offer 2 annual pay it forward days where you can take time to volunteer for a charitable cause that is important to you.
• Wellness days - we believe you can only work your best when you feel your best, and we know working at Lorum is intense, so we offer 3 wellness days every quarter where you can take time to re-energize