Creative Director / Head of Design

Job description

Convex is the backend platform that keeps up with you and your agents. Our mission is to fundamentally change how software is built on the Internet by empowering developers to create fast, reliable, and dynamic apps without a backend team. We provide a full-stack app platform carefully designed with database, compute and backend abstractions that allow developers and LLMs to move fast but also create products that scale and remain simple over their lifetime. The Team: https://convex.dev/about-us Convex has assembled a team that has built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world and scaled companies to millions in revenue and thousands of employees. We’re a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people that love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. We hire primarily in SF but have a few experienced folks working remotely in certain situations. The Role: We have a real point of view and an obsession with craft. So far, this comes through mostly in our product. We need someone to own the creative identity of Convex and define what that looks and feels like. Our customers are developers, who can spot inauthenticity instantly. The brand has to be distinct, thoughtful, a little playful, and honest. The kind of thing a skeptical engineer trusts on sight. The scope is broad. Brand, product design, marketing, events, the website: everything a developer encounters. The challenge isn't just doing the work, it's deciding what matters most. Convex is moving fast and there's more to own than any one person can cover, so the best person for this role is someone with the strategic judgment to prioritize ruthlessly and the conviction to hold a creative vision across a wide surface area. This is a build-it-yourself role before it's a manage-it role. You'll be doing the work yourself, in Figma and in the codebase, working directly with the founders on brand and product. As we grow you'll hire a small, excellent group around you to scale your vision. What You'll Do: - Set the creative strategy for how Convex shows up across brand and product, and make the calls on what to prioritize. - Own the Convex brand and identity across every touch point. - Do the work yourself now (alongside our existing team of creative freelancers), and build a small, world-class creative team later. - Set and hold the bar for taste across everything. - Keep us honest: kill the marketing BS before it ships, including ours. - Make a bunch of cool stuff. What Excites Us: - A portfolio with range: brand systems and product design, not just one or the other. - Taste that's calibrated for a technical, skeptical audience and a track record to prove it. - The ability to set direction and also open the file and do the work. - The judgment to prioritize across a broad surface area and hold a creative vision while doing it. - Experience building or leading a small creative team. - Interest in working in-person at Convex's office in SF. IDEAL CHARACTERISTICS This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of people who tend to thrive at Convex. We have a high demand for taste, craft, and commercial instinct, while also having the typical demands of a small startup. DO THEY HAVE TASTE, WITH RECEIPTS? We don't mean taste as an abstraction. We mean a track record of shipping things that are genuinely excellent, and a strong point of view on why they're good. Excellence can't be learned passively; we want to see the work and hear the reasoning behind it. DO THEY THINK STRATEGICALLY ABOUT BRAND? Great creative leaders have a point of view on where the brand should go, not just how to execute what's in front of them. We want someone who can look at Convex and form a clear opinion about what it should stand for visually, how it should evolve, and what it should never be. That conviction is what makes a brand coherent over time. CAN THEY EXECUTE AND DREAM? Strategy without execution is just theory. The best creative leaders we've seen can go from a brand direction conversation with a founder to opening Figma and making it real themselves. We need both, and we need them in the same person. DO THEY GET DEVELOPERS? Developer tools are different. Positioning that works for a consumer app or a sales-led B2B product falls flat with engineers, who are quick to spot anything that doesn't ring true. We want someone who understands, in their bones, what it feels like to be a skeptical developer deciding whether to trust a tool. DO THEY VALUE SIMPLICITY? The best design, like the best systems, is simple. We have a bias toward doing fewer things and doing them really well, and we want a creative leader who shares it: someone who can make a hard idea feel obvious and a complex surface feel intentional. DO THEY BRING ENERGY TO THE ROOM? Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We're meant to be having fun here.