Art Director, Brand Systems

About the role

We're hiring an Art Director, Brand Systems to be the creative anchor of the Relay brand as we scale. This is a hands-on, systems-minded role for someone who's done this work before — built and operationalized a design system in Figma, shipped high-quality work across every medium a modern B2B brand needs, and uses AI tools fluently to move faster without compromising craft.

Responsibilities

• Build and own our design system. This is the core of the role. You'll establish, scale, and maintain a Figma design system that brings consistency to every surface of the brand — component libraries, tokens, typography and color systems, layout patterns, and documentation that empowers the rest of the team to produce on-brand work without bottlenecks.
• You'll also bring AI tools into how the system is built and maintained, using AI assistants for naming conventions, decision logic, documentation, and ongoing consistency audits across the system.
• Lead day-to-day creative production across every medium we touch. Sales enablement (one-pagers, decks, segment- and partner-specific collateral), conference materials (booths, signage, takeaways, swag), digital advertising, web, and ongoing brand work.
• You'll move fluidly between print, digital, physical, and web — and make smart calls about what each format demands.
• Use AI as a force multiplier. You'll integrate AI tools into your daily workflow for ideation, layout exploration, asset variation, and production. You'll build prompt libraries, templates, and repeatable workflows the rest of the team can plug into.
• Translate strategy into creative. Take direction from the Creative Director and stakeholders across the company and turn it into briefs, moodboards, and finished work that ladders back to brand and business goals.
• Set and hold the quality bar. Review work, give clear and constructive feedback, and make sure everything that ships under the Relay name is on-brand, on-strategy, and well-crafted.
• Mentor and grow the team. You'll partner with and eventually manage a Production Designer (hired alongside this role), provide direction to freelance partners, and help shape the operating rhythm of an in-house creative team that's still being built.
• Partner with the Creative Director on brand evolution. As the company grows, the brand will need to evolve with it. You'll be a key thought partner on how the visual system stretches into new channels, audiences, and campaigns.

  Qualifications

  • 5+ years of design or art direction experience, with a portfolio that demonstrates both systems thinking and high-craft execution.
  • Proven experience building and scaling a design system in Figma at another company. This is non-negotiable. In your portfolio or interview, we'll want to see the libraries, tokens, and documentation you've shipped — and hear how teams adopted them.
  • Recent, hands-on experience using AI tools as part of your design workflow, specifically as thinking partners for system architecture, consistency audits, documentation, and decision logic. We're looking for designers who've spent the last 12 to 18 months actively living in AI tools, not designers who are curious about them.
  • Expert proficiency in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign).
  • Strong cross-medium range. You're equally comfortable directing a print one-pager, a website module, a tradeshow booth, and a digital ad — and you understand what each medium demands.
  • Experience providing creative direction and feedback to other designers, and a genuine interest in mentorship and team building.
  • Excellent communication. You can translate strategy into creative direction, write a clear brief, and explain creative decisions to non-creative stakeholders.
  • A calm, organized approach to managing multiple projects and competing priorities. You can hold the bar without slowing the work down.

  Skills

  • B2B SaaS experience (highly desirable).
  • Web design fluency and comfort partnering with developers.
  • Motion or video direction experience.
  • Photography direction or production experience.
  • Conference and event creative experience.
  • Experience integrating AI into team-wide design operations, not just personal workflow.

  Benefits

  The future of frontline work is being built here. Come build it with us. We can’t wait to hear from you. We use AI tools to transcribe and summarize interviews for internal hiring purposes. Transcripts are accessible only to authorized hiring personnel and retained consistent with our data retention policies. Candidates who prefer not to have AI notetaking used may request to opt out without impact to your candidacy. For more information, please see our Candidate and Employee Privacy Notice linked here.