Senior Director, Brand and Marketing Design

GitHub is looking for an experienced Senior Director to lead a group of Designers and Engineers working on bringing our brand to life through web experiences, illustration, 3D, motion, visual design, and innovative technologies. The Brand team is responsible for strategizing and executing on new visual identities, smart campaigns, strategic landing pages, branded themes, and in-product experiences. 

You’ll be influencing the brand direction, building on our design system, and setting strategic priorities. Collaboration is the key to GitHub’s success, and you will work closely with other designers, project managers, engineers, product managers, and marketing team stakeholders to propose design solutions and ensure a successful outcome. 

GitHub is changing the way the world builds software, and the Brand team plays a large role in making this a reality. The team creates delight, connects makers, and facilitates innovation at large.   We believe every pixel matters, the way we approach building marketing pages reflects the quality of our product. We want you to help build GitHub.

What we're looking for:

Leaders in the Design org often have IC experience in the same field as the people they will be leading. Our leaders are people managers, and provide design direction. For this specific role we're looking for someone who values the following:

• Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context to the larger system of the product, as well as ensuring we support experiences for individual features.
• Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our design system should reflect that, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Designing for inclusivity first, can lead us to solving problems for the many, and open up our product for more people.
• Creating together: Getting to the right result is our focus, this can come from systems designers or product designers, and ideally both. Facilitating collaboration between teams and individuals is key so that we continue to evolve the design system alongside the needs of the product.
• Progress and impact: Our team often works on the meta and so it's easy to get caught up in the design details. We have to be mindful of this and ensure we keep making decisions and move forward. This means being solutions-oriented and prioritizing progress over correctness when it's the right call.
• Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between peers and leadership. It can take time and effort to get there but it's worth it. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes, will yield better results when we can get to the “real talk”.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-functional team of brand designers, product designers, and design engineers to craft experiences that are deeply authentic to our developer audience and consistently meet quality standards.
• Own the overall vision and creative direction for GitHub’s brand.
• Drive a strategic roadmap of initiatives in collaboration with Design Infrastructure, Product, Engineering, and Marketing leadership.
• Develop and implement processes and tools that will enable the team to scale and meet the ever-increasing needs of the business. Shape resource and org structure decisions.
• Ensure your team regularly ships agreed-upon deliverables, looking to exceed expectations when opportunities arise. 
• Demonstrate exceptional communication at every level of the business, influence executives and inspire team members.
• Collaborate with cross-functional peers and executives to build campaigns, onboarding flows, and customer experiences that can be widely adopted by global teams. 
• Facilitate hiring as well as mentorship and career development.
• Cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of design/creative experience, 7+ years of management experience.
• You have experience scaling design teams to support a large and fast-growing company. 
• You are a skilled operator and are comfortable overseeing multiple design projects, ensuring that your team can stay focused on creating great experiences.
• You have an ability to understand broad and complex problems and distill them down into an actionable set of deliverables.
• You consistently lead high quality experiences across content, design, and engineering to deliver on revenue, brand awareness, or adoption goals. 
• You have a technical understanding of capabilities and limitations for web platforms.
• You have a passion for the web as a storytelling medium and experience in leading teams to the boundaries of what’s possible in modern web development (think WebGL experiments, CSS art, new JavaScript methodologies, etc) 
• You know how to apply just enough process, keeping the team nimble and successful in a culture that values moving fast and iterating quickly.
• You can find the highest impact opportunities and iterate on them quickly while things are in motion.

Bonus qualifications:

• You are comfortable in writing HTML & CSS, using github.com, and Git version control.
• You’ve led brand initiatives focused on developer audiences.