Senior Director, Creative
About the role
The Senior Director, Creative role is pivotal in leading and scaling Braze's design function. This leader is responsible for building a high-performing design team that is grounded in strong conceptual thinking, and for ensuring that design systems are insight-led, scalable, and emotionally resonant.
Responsibilities
- Lead and scale a high-performing, conceptually strong design team spanning brand, motion, and multi-disciplinary creative
- Build teams intentionally—prioritizing conceptual thinking, taste, and strategic fluency, not just executional skill
- Establish and uphold a clear, non-negotiable quality bar for design, craft, and thinking
- Mentor and develop junior leaders so they are prepared to take on delegated ownership, responsibilities, and team leadership
- Push leadership downward, enabling designers and emerging leads to operate with confidence and autonomy
- Create clear growth paths, expectations, and feedback mechanisms for all levels of the team
- Design and implement repeatable design systems, workflows, and processes that allow the team to deliver consistently high-quality work at scale
- Identify inefficiencies in briefing, reviews, production, and delivery—and proactively solve for them
- Partner with Creative Ops and Marketing Ops to ensure design processes scale with organizational growth
- Create templates, frameworks, and visual systems that reduce friction and increase speed without compromising quality
- Balance craft excellence with operational rigor, making "great work, done efficiently" the standard
- Partner deeply with the strategy function within the Creative and Brand team to ensure design is rooted in clear strategic intent
- Translate insights, positioning, and brand frameworks into compelling, scalable visual systems
- Pressure-test strategy through a design lens—helping refine ideas into clear, emotionally resonant expressions
- Ensure design work ladders back to brand and business objectives, not just aesthetic goals
- Champion conceptual thinking across the design team, ensuring ideas drive visuals—not the other way around
- Act as a creative counterpart to strategy leadership, collaborating early to shape creative direction and success criteria
- Establish strong working rhythms with strategy partners through working sessions, reviews, and planning checkpoints
- Proactively surface and resolve misalignment between strategy and execution
- Cross-functionally, operate with senior leadership and executives to align design strategy with business priorities
- Operate across marketing by building trusted relationships with Brand, Product Marketing, Demand, Events, Content, and Comms teams
- Serve as the final decision-maker on visual direction for the brand
- Anticipate cross-functional needs and creative risks before they arise—and build processes to address them
- Represent the design function as a strategic partner, not just a service function
- Own and evolve the visual identity and design systems for the brand across all touchpoints
- Partner closely with motion designers to integrate movement into the brand system
- Oversee freelancers, vendors, and production partners to ensure consistency and quality
- Step into hands-on design selectively when strategic or conceptual leadership is required
Requirements
15+ years of professional design experience, with senior leadership responsibility
5+ years of people management experience, including building and evolving teams
Proven ability to build conceptually strong, high-performing creative teams
Strong strategic thinker who connects design decisions to brand and business outcomes
Comfortable making difficult people decisions in the service of quality and scale
Experienced in both agency and client-side environments
Deep expertise across design tools and systems (Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, motion fundamentals)
Confident partnering with developers, strategists, and senior stakeholders
Qualifications
Not specified
Skills
Not specified
Benefits
Not specified
Pay
Not specified
Schedule
Not specified