The Role

You are an experienced digital designer: strategic, detail-oriented, and multi-skilled. You combine technical precision with creative ambition, bringing a strong understanding of visual design, user experience, interface design, branding, and front-end principles. You think in systems, care deeply about craft, and know how to take ideas from concept through delivery.

At Koto, you’ll help shape world-class digital experiences that bring brands to life across platforms, translating bold ideas into work that’s as thoughtful as it is beautifully executed.

Your Responsibilities

1. Generate strong digital ideas rooted in brand, UX, and UI, and communicate them clearly both visually and verbally.

2. Translate brand strategy, identity, and visual systems into distinctive digital experiences across web, product, and other interactive touchpoints.

3. Spend significant time designing, from early concepts and prototypes to polished UI, interaction details, and final delivery.

4. Bring together UX, UI, accessibility, motion, content, and development considerations into cohesive, brand-led digital experiences.

5. Clearly articulate the thinking behind the work, bringing confidence and clarity to client presentations, reviews, and stakeholder conversations.

6. Translate insights from immersion and strategy phases into tangible design outcomes.

7. Take ownership of design quality across your workstreams, balancing craft and priorities as you move between multiple pages, features, or project needs.

8. Collaborate closely with strategists, writers, designers, developers, producers, and creative directors to move the work forward.

9. Contribute to a feedback-rich team culture that values critique, iteration, and craft.

10. Operate independently, managing your own time, meetings, deadlines, and growth with care, while staying open to feedback and direction from senior team members.

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years of experience in digital design, product design, or a related field, ideally within an agency, product, or studio environment.

• You have a strong portfolio showing end-to-end digital work across concept, UX, UI, visual design, interaction, and prototyping.

• You have a strong visual design foundation and care about the details that elevate work from functional to excellent.

• You have strong skills in typography, layout, UI design, interaction design, and visual storytelling. Motion design or deeper brand design experience is a plus.

• You're comfortable with ambiguity and bring structure and curiosity to problems where there isn't always a clear path forward.

• You connect design decisions to business goals and customer needs and can clearly advocate for those decisions to stakeholders.

• You have fluency in creating and evolving design systems, modular UI, component libraries, and style guides.

• You’re highly proficient in Figma, with a strong grasp of modern digital design workflows, prototyping, and collaboration.

• You’re collaborative and proactive in iterative environments where teams share work often and build on each other’s ideas.

Our Responsibilities

1. We will ensure you have meaningful and regular access to your manager to support your personal development and career trajectory.

2. We will actively reward performance with promotions, pay increases, and a discretionary annual bonus of up to 10% of salary to all employees.

3. We ensure Koto is an equal environment for all its employees.

4. We will support you in taking family leave and offer significant paid maternity and paternity.

5. We will actively encourage you to take 25 days of holiday per year, in addition to DE bank holidays (on average, 10), one additional holiday day per year (capped at 5 additional days), and a studio closure between Christmas and New Year.

6. We will contribute an additional 15% (Entgeltumwandlung) to anyone who wants to participate in our company pension scheme.

7. We’ll provide you with comprehensive health insurance through DKV. In addition, you‘ll receive €50 each month on your Givve card.

8. We offer YCN access and fund relevant training opportunities for any employee looking to develop themselves and their career.

9. We reward five years of service with $5,000 and five days' holiday. We reward ten years of service with $10,000 and four weeks' holiday.

10. We will give you the opportunity to work from any of the five Koto studios globally, with appropriate planning and application.

Our Culture

• At Koto, we encourage our team to be ‘rationally optimistic’ about the potential of our work, our clients, their businesses, and the power of brand.

• We pursue the best briefs, want to inspire meaningful work, and, for those interested, provide an opportunity to make the work of their lives. We are actively cultivating leadership, culture, and spaces to encourage this.

• We work in person, with an optional WFH day on Friday and an additional 20 remote days per year. We believe this produces the best work, mentoring opportunities, collective learning, and culture.

• We encourage autonomy in each member of our team, allowing them to manage their own time, hours, and personal commitments appropriately to complete work.