Email Design Lead for a US Retention Agency (South America)

Email Design Lead
Remote. Full-time. South America. Paid in USD.
Performance retention agency for 9-figure DTC brands. Email and SMS are the product. Design is not decoration on top of it. Campaigns have to look like the brand and still convert. The book spans fashion editorial, clean beauty, loud CPG, and luxury accessories. One house style will not work here.
We are hiring the person who owns email design quality across the agency, and we are hiring in South America because the work runs on US hours and the talent here is better than the market pays for.
This is a player-coach seat. You set the first designs for every new client yourself. You build the visual system they will live in: type, photography treatment, merchandising, campaign worlds. Then you lead the graphic designers who execute against that system, and you hold the bar on everything that leaves the agency.
If you have only ever executed someone else's art direction, or only designed for one brand in-house, this is not the role.
What you'll own
The first emails for every new client. You design them. You do not brief them out and hope.
The visual system for each brand: type, photography (crop, cutout, collage), color, merchandising, motion if it earns its place.
Design quality across the whole book of business. If a campaign looks like a Klaviyo template, a restyled module, or a social graphic dumped into an email, that is on you.
The graphic designers. Brief them, critique the work, raise the floor, and keep them shipping at the standard you set.
Campaign-level art direction for weekly sends, promos, and drops. Each drop should feel like a designed world, not a product grid with a new header.
Partnership with strategists and copywriters. You take a brief and make it look expensive. You push back when the brief will produce generic work.
Taste across categories. A fashion drop and a clean beauty campaign should not share a layout.
Language
Agency works in English. You will run critique, take briefs, and sit on client calls in English every day. Written English is not enough on its own. If you would not be comfortable pushing back on a US strategist in a live call, this is the wrong seat and we would both find that out in week two.
Hours
You hold 9am to 5pm EST every working day. The rest of your day is yours to shape. São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago are EST plus 1 or 2. Lima and Quito are EST. If you are not willing to protect that window, do not apply.
Requirements
You have worked at an agency that services 8-9-figure ecommerce / DTC brands. Name the agency and the brands. "Worked with" logos you never designed for do not count.
An exceptional email book. Campaign art direction, not flow production. Custom display type, photography that is treated, merchandising that still looks designed. If the book is catalog, sale, and default type, do not apply.
You still design. This is not a Creative Director seat for someone who only critiques. The first work on a new client is yours.
You have led designers before. Small team is fine. You know how to brief, redline, and get better work out of other people without sanding it down to safe.
Mastery of Figma. Adobe is assumed. You can build for Klaviyo without designing like Klaviyo.
Range. Fashion, beauty, CPG, accessories. One aesthetic is a specialist. We need a lead.
Fluent professional English, spoken and written. This is a hard requirement, not a preference.
Based in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru or Ecuador, and able to work 9am to 1pm EST.
Send a portfolio link with your application. Applications without a book that shows email work go straight to the bottom of the pile. If your email work is under NDA, send the closest editorial or campaign work you can share and say so.
Benefits
PTO
Performance Bonuses
Paid in USD
Fully remote, permanently