Creative Lead

About the role

We're looking for a designer to join Verdera early — someone who wants to own the creative direction of a company, not just execute inside it. This is not a product design role. It's not a brand design role. It's the role that decides what both of those look like.

Verdera is building infrastructure for climate adaptation. The institutions we work with are serious, slow, and credibility-driven. The design has to earn trust before anything else. At the same time, we're a startup with a point of view — and that point of view needs to show up in everything from a slide deck to a website to a case study about a flood in Bangladesh.

If you're comfortable jumping between brand, product, and web — and you find that variety energising rather than chaotic — this is probably the right fit. If you need clear lanes, it probably isn't.

What you'll own

• The brand, end to end. Visual identity, design systems, the overall vibe — as Verdera grows, you're the person making sure it stays consistent and gets sharper, not blurrier.
• The design collateral that makes the business work. Proposals, pitch decks, templates, one-pagers. The stuff that goes in front of ministers and investment committees. It has to look serious and feel like us.
• Our digital presence. Setting the visual direction for the website and owning how it evolves. Not just executing a design — deciding what it should feel like in the first place.
• Turning field work into stories. We do real deployments in real places. Helping translate that work into case studies, visual narratives, and demos that make it legible to people who weren't there.

How this is different

Ownership — You own the identity, not a slice of it. Most design roles are scoped. This one isn't. You're responsible for what Verdera looks and feels like — across every medium, every context, every audience. That's unusual at this stage and it's intentional.

AI-first — We actually operate with AI, not just build with it. We use internal agents, virtual collaborators, and AI-augmented workflows as a matter of course. You'll be expected to bring that into how you work — and push what that means for a designer who takes craft seriously.

Lean by design — Small team. Best tools. Senior advisors when needed. We're not lean because we can't afford otherwise. We're lean because we believe it produces better work. You'll have access to the tools and people you need — and full responsibility for what you do with them.

Collaboration — You'll work with external studios, not just internal teams. You'll collaborate directly with a design studio on brand story, a social media agency on content, and storytellers documenting our work in the field. Your job is to hold the thread across all of them.

Creative freedom — No template for what this should look like. We're not asking you to look at what other climate companies are doing and do a better version of that. The brief is: make something that earns emotion. The reference could be a punk rock band or a simple earthenware brand. The point is the work should move people as we build this from the ground up.

A note on what "collaborating" means here. You won't be managing large teams or building out a department. You'll be the thread — the person who holds a consistent creative direction across a design studio, a social agency, and external storytellers. That's a different skill from management, and for the right person, it's more interesting. We're not asking you to compete with what already exists. We're asking you to make something that didn't exist before.

Not for you if

• You want to manage and grow a design team — that's not on the roadmap here and it won't be for a while.
• You need a clear scope before you start — the scope is "make Verdera's creative direction excellent", and that's intentionally open-ended.
• You're most comfortable in a pure product design lane — this role crosses into brand, narrative, and presentation in ways that won't feel clean.
• You're resistant to AI tools in your workflow — we're AI-first in how we operate internally, and that's not changing.
• You find cross-timezone collaboration draining by default — there will be early morning and late night calls. That's part of working on a global team.

Practicalities

• Location: Global, remote with quarterly travel.
• Compensation: Salary + equity.
• Remote months: 2 fully remote months per year. Both founders travel and expect you to use this.
• Team: Global. Cross-timezone calls are normal. Early mornings and late nights will happen.
• Tools: We spend more than most on best-in-class tools. Webflow, Framer, AI agents — bring what you use.
• Stage: Early. First anchor client deployed. This is a founding team hire.

Apply

Sound like your kind of problem? No long process. Tell us who you are, show us some work, and tell us what you'd do differently at Verdera.