Sr Brand Designer - Brand Foundations

About the role

The Brand Foundations team at Payward is responsible for creating and maintaining the core brand system that supports all of our products. This role involves owning and evolving the brand guidelines, component libraries, templates, and asset libraries that product pods rely on every day. The ideal candidate will raise brand quality across pods by providing better tools, clearer guidance, and a higher bar to aim for.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the core brand system: brand guidelines, component libraries, templates, and asset libraries that product pods rely on every day.
• Raise brand quality across pods. Not by policing, but by showing the way.
• Develop and maintain visual identity standards across Payward's portfolio of brands, keeping them coherent as products grow and evolve.
• Define and document how our brand should behave across emerging surfaces, AI generated outputs, motion and new product categories. Before ambiguity becomes inconsistency.
• Collaborate with pod designers, marketers, and product partners to understand where the system is breaking down and fix it at the root, not the symptom.
• Translate complex concepts such as crypto rails, on-chain finance, and institutional trading into clear, usable brand guidance that non-brand specialists can apply with confidence.
• Lead design reviews with a constructive, generative approach: your feedback opens doors, it doesn't close them.
• Stay ahead of how design tools (including AI) are changing creative practice, and shape how Payward's brand system adapts.

Requirements

Deep experience as a brand designer in agency, in-house, or both. With a track record of building and evolving systems, not just executing within them. Systems thinking as a default mode. You see patterns, spot structural problems, and solve for the whole rather than the instance. Strong experience with motion or working alongside motion designers; comfort with the full range of digital brand touchpoints. Brand identity expertise: you understand how visual systems create meaning, trust, and recognition at scale. Strategic affinity — you're comfortable working upstream of execution, helping define what the brand should stand for before anyone opens Figma. A strong communicator who can articulate brand decisions clearly to designers, PMs, marketers, and leadership alike. A portfolio showing not just craft, but judgment: clear visual systems, coherent brand thinking, and evidence that your work made others' work better. Mastery of Figma and Adobe Creative Suite; fluency with how design tooling, including AI, is reshaping brand practice. Genuine curiosity about crypto, technology, and what financial ownership means for individuals around the world.