Executive Design Advisor

About the Team

Our Product & Design org spans Growth, Marketplace, New 0—> 1 bets, and Operations — building the experiences that connect chefs to the millions of people who eat their food every week. Design sits at the center of how we translate that mission into a product people love using.

About the Role

CookUnity is looking for a design leader to elevate both the craft and the velocity of our design organization and consumer experience — starting in an advisory capacity. This is a mandate to shape the aesthetic bar for a fast-scaling consumer brand, elevate how the product expresses our brand identity, communicates our unique value proposition, and modernize how our design organization works in an AI-native era. We're not looking for a figurehead. We're looking for someone who still has strong opinions about pixels, has run design orgs through real scale, and has already rewired how their teams work with AI-assisted tools — not as an experiment, but as standard practice.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision for the brand visual identity and bring the essence of CookUnity to life through a differentiated design system that shapes all consumer touchpoints
• Bring a proven aesthetic sensibility from a top-tier B2C consumer brand and apply it to CookUnity's product surfaces, informing both day-to-day craft and our longer-term design language
• Refine key elements of the brand identity system to up-level craft, refinement, and meet the needs of an expanding ecosystem of channels and activation formats
• Define CookUnity’s approach to visual storytelling across marketing surfaces and key consumer touchpoints like packaging
• Ensure design consistency and brand cohesion throughout the marketing funnel and consumer journey to maximize brand equity and recognition
• Diagnose where our design org can leapfrog in adopting AI-assisted workflows (Figma AI, generative design, prompt-to-design pipelines) and where the industry is heading, and build a credible, sequenced uplift plan
• Coach new tools and workflows into daily practice — pairing directly with our design team on real projects, not just delivering a slide deck of recommendations
• Partner closely with Product and Marketing leadership to ensure design strategy is tightly linked to product and business priorities

Qualifications

• VP or CDO-level experience at a top-tier, high-craft B2C consumer brand, with a track record of shaping product design at scale
• Proven experience building and leading high-performing design organizations
• Genuine fluency in AI-assisted design tooling (Figma AI, generative workflows, prompt-to-design pipelines) — you've already integrated these into a team's real practice, not just piloted them
• A coaching mindset: able to walk into an existing team, diagnose gaps without demoralizing people, and bring them along — part teacher, part champion, part operator
• Ability to leverage generative AI to increase output quality and speed

Preferred Requirements

• Experience in food, wellness, marketplace, or subscription consumer businesses

About CookUnity

CookUnity is the first Chef-Direct Subscription service—a chef-to-food lover marketplace connecting the country's most talented chefs with eaters (consumers). We’re changing meal delivery by bringing small-batch, restaurant-quality meals to eaters across the country. Every week, a diverse collective of all-star chefs craft their signature, ready-to-eat dishes for an elevated at-home dining experience.

In 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity has almost 1000 employees and delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul. Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

Compensation for this role is open for discussion based on advisory capacity and time commitment.