AKQA

• Lead day-to-day project management across a complex digital product engagement, ensuring clarity of priorities, timelines, deliverables, and accountability across all workstreams • Serve as the central point of coordination between internal AKQA teams (strategy, UX, design, technology) and client stakeholders • Manage project schedules, milestones, and dependencies with meticulous detail, proactively identifying risks and driving timely resolution • Oversee scope management and change control, partnering with discipline leads to assess impact and maintain alignment on approved work • Support resourcing coordination, ensuring the right people are engaged at the right time across the project lifecycle • Facilitate regular project ceremonies and working sessions, keeping teams aligned and focused on outcomes • Maintain clear and consistent project documentation (status reports, RAID logs, decision logs, meeting notes) that keep all stakeholders informed • Partner with the client to manage expectations, communicate progress, and navigate complexity with composure and clarity • Ensure delivery processes align with agile, waterfall, or hybrid methodologies as required by the engagement • Contribute to continuously improving delivery practices and ways of working within the project and broader team

• Lead UX thinking and direction across one or more concurrent workstreams, balancing strategic vision with hands-on delivery • Collaborate closely and fluidly with visual and product designers to ensure UX and design are tightly aligned throughout the process • Contribute to, maintain, and champion design systems—ensuring consistency, scalability, and adoption across teams • Define and communicate user journeys, flows, interaction patterns, and key design decisions with clarity and rationale • Independently deliver innovative solutions to complex problems, responsibly introducing new patterns where existing ones fall short • Distill research, data, and strategic inputs into clear UX direction that can be understood and acted on by cross-functional partners • Guide and provide feedback to more junior UX practitioners, supporting quality and growth across the team • Partner with product, strategy, and technology leads to ensure experience decisions are grounded in both user needs and business goals • Communicate effectively with senior stakeholders on both the agency and client sides, presenting work with confidence and clarity • Contribute to continuously raising the bar for UX standards, deliverables, and processes within the engagement

• Lead with hunger, not hierarchy. Drive the creation of bold ideas across campaigns, products, and experiences • Write Arabic that lives in culture. Craft original Arabic copy across Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects • Be a hands-on craft obsessive. Write, refine, rewrite, and elevate various types of content • Bring cultural intelligence. Inject regional insights into the work • Tell stories that travel. Shape narratives that work across multiple platforms • Think beyond the ad. Collaborate with various stakeholders to shape ideas that extend beyond campaigns • Bring energy that lifts the room. Embrace challenges as fuel • Create work that earns attention. Ideas should be culturally relevant and built for conversation • Operate like a modern creative, comfortable with various tools and mediums • Collaborate fearlessly with multidisciplinary talent across the global network • Present with conviction during reviews and meetings • Contribute to the culture by inspiring others and pushing experimentation

• Lead with maker energy. Drive design, craft, and execution with pace and pride, raising the bar on every visual, system, and experience, and pushing visuals to be bolder, clearer, and more culturally relevant. • Think in systems, not assets. Build identities and design languages that scale across channels and evolve over time. Create rules and rhythms, not just one-off screens. • Craft with obsession. Sweat the details: spacing, alignment, type, transitions, iconography, accessibility, responsiveness. Your work should feel authored, intentional and world-class. • Design beyond the screen. Bring the same design intelligence to environments, packaging, content ecosystems, installations and tech-enabled experiences. Understand how a brand behaves in the real world. • Make work that travels. Create a design with PR potential: iconic, ownable, culturally legible. Understand what will land locally in MENA and what will travel globally. • Own the process end-to-end. From early explorations and mood boards to design development, artworking, production files and QA, you shepherd quality through every phase. • Collaborate like a modern designer. Work fluidly with writers, strategists, creative directors, technologists, makers, AI tools and the broader AKQA network. Invite critique and use friction to sharpen outcomes. • Present with clarity and taste. Tell the design story: the rationale, the system, the choices and the craft, guiding clients through what matters and why it works. • Guard the standard. Be accountable for every deliverable. Ensure every layout, screen, prototype, deck page and asset meets AKQA's global level and reflects the studio's ambition.

• Support a well-known automotive brand in designing digital experiences • Help balance user needs, business goals, and technical realities • Collaborate with cross-functional partners • Ideate and prototype to ensure intuitive and accessible experiences

• Lead process of identifying and clarifying product requirements for clients using interviews, workshops, and surveys across stakeholders • Collaborate with UX and Strategy leads to discern customer problems and pain points for a workflow, individual existing product, new product concept, or ecosystem or products • Create and maintain the following deliverables: • Use Cases • Business Requirements • Functional Requirements • Product Backlog • Liaison between the business, creative and technology teams to ensure a common understanding of business requirements and solutions • Catalogue background knowledge and develop subject matter expertise to share with the internal team, resolve questions the team may have that impacts the direction of the work • Work side-by-side with our creative team to refine/clarify requirements as well as provide guidance on proposed solutions • Understand how proposed solutions may impact technical implementation and highlight potential challenges early so that dependencies may be resolved • Interface with internal and external development teams to ensure product vision is carried through to the final product • Ensure the accuracy of all project deliverables against approved requirements • Help establish scope of work and prioritize high-level requirements, working with Client, Project Manager, and Technical Architect • Develop a tactical product roadmap by conducting prioritization exercises • Provide recommendations on product direction based on expertise and analysis • Outline delivery needs based on requirements, product knowledge, and approved creative concepts • Assist in writing functional specifications defining the proposed creative solution • Participate in the communication of solutions to clients and third-party partners • Generate and maintain a backlog of epics and user stories to support a development lifecycle

• Take technical ownership of medium to large-scale web platforms, contributing hands-on while guiding architectural and delivery decisions. • Translate business goals into robust, scalable technical solutions. • Provide technical leadership through mentoring, code reviews, and pairing. • Design and evolve front-end and back-end architectures with a focus on performance, accessibility, security, and maintainability. • Identify technical risks, delivery bottlenecks, and systemic issues proactively. • Champion high-quality engineering practices such as automated testing, CI/CD, and observability. • Operate within Agile, Lean, or hybrid delivery models, adapting processes pragmatically.

• Define end-to-end test strategy for complex engagements • Write clear, reusable test cases using BDD/Gherkin formats • Lead test execution across multiple test types (functional, regression, exploratory, etc.) • Author and maintain automated test suites using Playwright • Validate implementation against experience design specifications • Communicate test status and quality risks to stakeholders • Support release gate decisions with quality assessments • Raise concerns when quality risks are present • Partner with engineers on defect triage and root-cause analysis • Conduct accessibility testing according to WCAG/ADA standards • Provide accurate level of effort estimates for projects

• Drive the strategy, client relationship, and delivery excellence for key client accounts • Own the end-to-end technology roadmap for client accounts • Maintain responsibility for the health of all technology initiatives • Lead, mentor, and develop the technology staff within client accounts • Collaborate with various teams to shape account direction • Define comprehensive solution architectures for new engagements • Proactively identify technology-driven growth opportunities • Evaluate new technologies and industry trends

At AKQA, we believe in the imaginative application of art and science to create beautiful ideas, products, and services. With an entrepreneurial and collaborative approach, we design adaptive digital services and applications that capture the imagination, delivering impressive returns for our clients. Creatives at AKQA apply artistry and craftsmanship to strategic insight, bringing to life ideas that move the world. Skilled problem solvers and storytellers, they thrive in a multidisciplinary environment to develop meaningful work that delights customers and delivers results for clients. We are seeking an experienced and passionate Freelance Senior Design Lead with a strong foundation in UI design for complex product systems. In this role, you will help shape digital experiences for marquee brands with household names, tackling multi-step, multi-lane processes that impact millions of people worldwide. You will be instrumental in translating complexity into intuitive, elegant design solutions that feel effortless to customers while maintaining brand integrity at scale. This is a remote freelance role, starting ASAP through the end of the year. ROLE REQUIREMENTS - Strong demonstration of user-centered design principles with an emphasis on UI craft in complex systems - Ability to design efficient, functional, and engaging digital experiences across multi-step flows and platforms - Experience navigating and simplifying interconnected product ecosystems and multi-lane processes - Proficiency in working both strategically (vision, patterns, systems) and tactically (flows, components, prototypes) - Deep empathy for end users, staff, and operators to inform design decisions - Strong understanding of web and app paradigms, interaction patterns, and design systems - High proficiency in Figma, including components, layouts, design systems, and interactive prototyping - Ability to plan, conduct, and synthesize research studies (e.g., usability testing, IDIs) to inform design decisions - Collaborative spirit—comfortable engaging with stakeholders, developers, and partners to reach the best outcomes - Proactive in identifying opportunities for better design and innovation, championing continuous improvement - Availability to work core business hours aligned to U.S. Eastern Time (ET), with flexibility for collaboration across additional time zones as needed QUALITIES AND CHARACTERISTICS - A compelling portfolio showing distinctive product design work, particularly UI within complex systems - Ability to develop simple and elegant solutions for multi-step, layered problems - Exceptional written, visual, and oral communication skills - Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with an inclusive, team-first mindset - Open to progressive thinking and exploring innovative approaches to design challenges REMOTE EXPECTATION This is a remote freelance role. Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. and able to work core business hours aligned to Eastern Time (ET). Occasional travel may be required for research, workshops, or team collaboration, depending on project needs. COMPENSATION $2,800 - $3,600/week 40 hours/week We believe great work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach including required in-office days. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process. AKQA is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers. About WPP WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com.