Creative Director

Job description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure. Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users. Our platform is trusted by over 6.5 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $257M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development. We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you. APPLYING TO RENDER We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team. We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed. Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time. 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 visa sponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization. Render is an equal-opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation. We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you! Render — CCPA Applicant Privacy Notice https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wKr9IejoT5McFrs9I2mahQnf6AFwb3z2/view Render — GDPR Applicant Privacy Notice https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_8jtyXQ1HdRdTdQn9sZ7n-R-zAGBmsFa/view