Principal Designer

Principal, Design | Madrid

Unispace

Some design roles are about delivering someone else’s vision.

This one is about setting it.

Unispace is looking for a Principal, Design to become a senior creative voice within our Madrid studio — leading exceptional workplace design, inspiring a talented team and helping us win and deliver work for some of the world’s most recognisable brands.

We’re not looking for somebody who has simply spent their career delivering fit-outs.

We want a genuinely creative designer with the ideas, presence and confidence to sit in front of global clients, challenge thinking, shape a design story and bring people with them.

The opportunity

As Principal, Design, you’ll play a key role in shaping the creative direction of our Madrid studio.

You’ll lead the design thinking behind major workplace projects, work closely with clients from the earliest conversations and take a prominent role in pitches, presentations and new-business opportunities .

You’ll also provide creative leadership to a small team of designers — developing people, raising the design bar and making sure great ideas translate into brilliant spaces.

This isn’t about running an entire office.

It’s about being the person people look to for design leadership .

You’ll have the opportunity to:

• Lead the creative direction of major workplace projects for high-profile global clients
• Front and influence design pitches, presentations and client workshops
• Develop strong relationships with senior client stakeholders
• Lead and mentor designers within the Madrid studio
• Push conceptual thinking and challenge conventional workplace design
• Work alongside strategy, delivery and commercial teams to turn ideas into successful projects
• Help build Unispace’s design reputation within Madrid and the wider global business

Who we’re looking for

Your title today could be Principal Designer, Design Director, Associate Director, Senior Associate, Interior Architect — or you could be an Architect whose career has moved strongly into workplace design .

We care much more about the work you’ve created than the title on your business card.

What matters is that you have:

• Significant workplace design experience — this is essential
• A portfolio demonstrating genuinely strong creative and conceptual thinking
• Experience within a design consultancy, architecture or interiors studio
• The confidence to pitch ideas and present to senior, international clients
• Experience leading projects and developing other designers
• An understanding of how great design and commercial reality work together
• Strong communication and storytelling skills
• The ability to take a project from an idea and create a compelling design narrative around it

A traditional Design & Build background is not essential . In fact, we’re particularly interested in meeting people who can bring influences, approaches and creative thinking from outside the typical D&B environment.

Likewise, architects are very welcome — provided your experience genuinely sits within workplace and interior design , rather than predominantly technical architectural packages, façades or shell-and-core work.

And Revit?

Revit is Unispace’s global design benchmark, so strong capability is highly desirable.

But we also recognise that exceptional designers don’t all arrive via exactly the same route.

If your portfolio is outstanding and you can demonstrate the creativity, leadership and client presence we’re looking for, we still want to hear from you.

Why Unispace?

Unispace operates across 48 global studios , creating workplaces for some of the world’s leading brands through an integrated strategy, design and delivery model.

For the right designer, Madrid offers the chance to have genuine influence: to shape the studio creatively, work with an international client base and become an important part of Unispace’s next generation of design leadership.

Interested?

Please apply with both your CV and portfolio .

We want to see what you’ve done — but more importantly, we want to see how you think.