About the Role

Render's mission is to eliminate the undifferentiated work that goes into building software products by offering an easy-to-use, powerful cloud platform for developer teams of all sizes. As we grow into the place to deploy AI-native apps and agents, our brand needs to match the company we're becoming: production-grade, not prototype-grade, and unmistakably ours across every surface a developer touches.

We're entering a deliberate brand evolution at Render. The work is maturing what already works, aligning it to where the company and our audience are headed (from solo developers to fast-scaling teams and enterprises), and codifying it into systems that hold as we scale. We're looking for a Creative Director to lead that evolution end-to-end and to support the brand team behind it.

This is a senior leadership role for a player/coach. We are looking for someone who can set the creative vision, hold the quality bar, and still go deep on the work when it matters. You'll lead a founding brand team through a defining stretch of work. You'll inherit a strong foundation and a talented founding team. Your mission is to provide strategic direction, elevate our creative standards, and guide us through this next phase of growth. This role is built for a leader who drives impact through craft and clarity, rather than just oversight.

You Will:

• Own Render's brand strategy and positioning. Partner with the Head of Design, product marketing, and executive stakeholders to lock positioning, brand attributes, and messaging architecture. You'll hold the hard line between production-grade credibility and the developer warmth that built Render.
• Set and uphold the creative vision across surfaces. From the marketing site to events (our developer conference, internal gatherings, and DevRel moments), social, brand, and product touchpoints, and the systems that make expression repeatable: visual identity, motion, illustration, voice, and tone. You'll define what great looks like and ensure everything we ship clears that bar.
• Lead and grow the brand design team. You'll manage, mentor, and develop a founding team of senior brand designers, and shape the team's structure as Render scales.
• Build brand as a system, not a series of one-offs. You'll drive the brand toward documented, reusable systems - guidelines, a versioned asset library, a maturing marketing design system - and keep brand and product design in sync as both evolve.
• Bring order to how our brand work ships. You'll shape how we prioritize and deliver creative work, maintaining a high-quality bar amid fast launch velocity and competing demands.
• Collaborate with product, marketing, and engineering leadership on how the brand shows up. These are in the company's biggest moments: launches, events, fundraising, and the next generation of Render's product surfaces.

We're Looking For:

• 10+ years of experience as an Art Director or Creative Director, ideally in developer tools, infrastructure, SaaS, or another technical, credibility-driven category.
• Proven experience managing and developing creative talent. You've led designers, given direct and actionable feedback, and built the kind of team culture where strong people do their best work. You see growing people as core to the job, not overhead.
• Strategic range. A portfolio that shows sharp brand thinking and the judgment to set a vision. You can go deep on the work when it matters.
• Exceptional craft and taste. A high bar for visual execution across digital, identity systems, and brand experience. You know when something hasn't cleared it yet.
• Fluency in brand-as-system. You understand design systems, guidelines, and the discipline that keeps a brand coherent as surface area and headcount grow - not just one-off execution.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills. You can co-own positioning with product marketing, collaborate with product design on shared surfaces without territory friction, and advocate for brand in leadership conversations.
• Credibility with a technical audience. You understand - or are eager to learn - what credibility looks like to developers and technical buyers, and why production-grade is a claim that has to be earned, not asserted.
• A leadership style built on trust and clarity. You raise the bar by growing senior people and shaping direction together with them, not through control.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience evolving a brand through a stage change, developer-first to enterprise-ready, without losing the original audience.
• A point of view on what AI-native products mean for brand and design, including how a brand shows up to agents, not only people.
• Experience leading brand and creative for events and conferences.
• Hands-on or design-engineering literacy: comfort near code, motion, or prototyping.
• Track record of creative side projects, talks, or writing that demonstrate your craft and point of view.

If this role excites you but you don't meet every single requirement, we'd still love to hear from you-your unique experience might be just what we need.

Benefits

• 4 weeks of paid vacation.
• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
• Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
• 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
• Continuous learning benefits & related support.

This position is generally not eligible for new visasponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.