Job Description
About Senior Brand Designer role
- We're looking for a Senior Brand Designer who leads with art direction and executes with craft. You'll shape how Paystack shows up across brand, marketing, product storytelling, and launch moments, and you'll set a creative bar that levels up everyone around you.
- This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who is equally strong at two things: finding the visual idea inside a brief and building it themselves. You'll direct across illustration, motion, photography, and video, and you'll also do the hands-on work, especially in brand and motion design. If you want to direct but not make, this isn't the role. If you want to make but not think strategically, it isn't either.
- You'll report to the Design Studio Lead and take full ownership of high-priority projects from early concept through polished execution. The Studio already has strong illustration and motion capabilities, so what we're adding is a sharp art director who can raise the ceiling on the work and sharpen the output of the whole team.
- This is a full-time Lagos-based role.
We'll trust you to
- Lead creative direction on high-priority work. From storytelling campaigns and product launches to web, social, events, presentations, and merch, you'll find the visual idea inside a brief and carry it through to polished execution.
- Build the brand system for scale. You'll create a library of assets, templates, and guidelines that let cross-functional partners ship brand-aligned work independently, and define how non-design teams do this well using AI tools.
- Design and animate the work, hands-on. Day to day, you'll be making the actual thing: campaign key visuals, social and web assets, motion pieces, launch graphics, event and merch design, and presentation systems. This is a making role as much as a directing one.
- Turn product and business stories into visual systems. You'll make Paystack feel clear, trustworthy, useful, and distinctive across every surface people encounter it.
- Direct across disciplines. You'll set the art direction for projects involving illustration, motion, photography, and video, working with teammates and external collaborators as needed.
- Ship across the full range of surfaces. A typical month might move from a launch campaign to a set of animated social posts to a pitch deck to event collateral. You'll size the work realistically and deliver it finished.
- Partner with Brand Storytelling. You'll shape the creative approach behind briefs and deliver work that serves both brand and business goals.
- Raise the bar. You'll bring sharp creative judgment to the team by sharpening ideas and improving execution, including work that isn't your own.
- Present and defend your thinking. You'll explain the reasoning behind your creative choices clearly enough that stakeholders understand how the work answers the brief.
- Give and receive feedback. You'll join design crits, share work early, and help the team sharpen its taste collectively.
You'll thrive in this role if you
- Craft & art direction
- 5+ years of design and art direction experience, ideally at a technology startup, agency, or product-led company.
- You are hands-on and senior in both brand and motion design. Your portfolio shows work you personally directed and work you personally made, and we can tell which is which.
- Your portfolio shows strong conceptual thinking, you can move past "this looks nice" to a clear idea, a reason it works, and metaphors that connects with the audience.
- You have excellent taste and visual judgment: a sharp eye for good design and can tell when something is almost working and name exactly what needs to change.
- You're obsessive about the details that make work feel finished: image quality, styling, spacing, texture, colour balance, consistency, and production quality.
- Proficient in Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Slides.
- Working across mediums & tone
- You have a sensitivity to brand tone: knowing when work should feel expressive, restrained, commercial, editorial, functional, or story-led, and how to stay distinctive without tipping into decoration for its own sake.
- You know how to make brand work that's useful and beautiful — work that clarifies a message, supports a story, and builds trust.
- You've built templates, guidelines, or asset libraries that help a brand scale consistently across teams.
- Judgement, critique & delivery
- You can turn loose input into a clear creative direction: defining the visual problem, setting constraints, identifying references, and explaining why weaker directions should be dropped.
- You give art-direction critique that's specific and useful
- You can collaborate with other senior creatives: debating direction, pressure-testing ideas, and pointing out weak spots, without getting defensive or precious about your own work.
- You're imaginative but realistic; you understand timelines, resources, and production constraints, and can share clear execution estimates for your work.
- You're comfortable presenting creative work to stakeholders and explaining the reasoning behind your decisions.
Bonus points if you
- Have experience on brand or product campaigns for technology companies.
- Have turned product UI into strong marketing or campaign visuals.
- Have built or prototyped with AI tools, or have a deep appreciation for design engineering and emerging creative workflows.
- Have experience collaborating with photographers, filmmakers, illustrators, or animators — useful but not required; this role doesn't need deep photo or video production experience.
- Love helping other designers learn and grow, and are open to learning from them too.