Director, Brand Creative

The role in a nutshell:

We are seeking a Director, Brand Creative to steward Chainguard’s visual identity across every touchpoint. This person will ensure our branding not only lands powerfully today, but evolves with us as we grow. From our website to event experiences to sales materials, they’ll be the creative force ensuring our brand is consistent, distinctive, and memorable. They will not only design, but also direct contractors and agencies, ensuring consistency, quality, and creativity in how our brand shows up in the world. The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced startup, has a strong network of design collaborators, and enjoys blending big-picture thinking with pixel-perfect execution.

What you’ll do:

• Brand stewardship: Own and iterate on Chainguard’s brand and visual identity across our website, presentations, event booths, sales collateral, swag, and other branded resources.
• Design leadership: Maintain brand guidelines that empower stakeholders across the company to create consistent, beautiful, and on-brand materials.
• Hands-on design: Own the design and production of high-priority assets, ensuring a high level of craft.
• Creative direction: Identify, vet, and manage freelance designers, illustrators, and agencies; provide feedback and direction to scale output while maintaining quality.
• Collaboration: Partner closely with Marketing, Product, and People teams to deliver assets that elevate the brand and meet business needs.
• Innovation: Push the creative boundaries of how Chainguard shows up across digital and physical channels, finding new ways to delight our audiences.

What we’re looking for:

• 7-10 years of design experience, ideally with at least 3-4 years leading brand-level design initiatives.
• A portfolio showcasing strong visual design, brand systems, and campaign work across digital and physical mediums.
• Proven experience implementing brand identities across web, print, and event environments.
• Excellent taste, attention to detail, and ability to maintain brand consistency.
• Comfortable in Figma for design systems, digital design, and collaboration. Skilled in Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign) for brand development, illustration, and print production.
• Ability to both execute and direct; able to context switch from getting into the weeds on an event booth to providing clear feedback to contractors.
• Strong network of freelance designers, illustrators, motion designers, and agencies you can bring into the fold.
• A collaborative approach to working with and influencing cross-functional partners, particularly groups without design experience or expertise.
• Comfortable operating in a startup environment, balancing speed and quality.
• Ideally experience designing for developer-friendly, technical brands.
• Bonus points for motion and animation chops.

About Us

Chainguard is the secure foundation for software development and deployment. By providing guarded open source software, built from source and updated continuously, Chainguard helps organizations eliminate threats in their software supply chains.

Founded by the industry's leading experts on open source software, security and cloud native development, Chainguard has built the largest library of open source software that is secure by default. 

Chainguard’s mission is to be the safe source for open source.

We live and breathe our company values:

We are customer obsessed - We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.

We have a bias for intentional action - We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.

We don’t take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) - We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.

We trust each other and assume good intentions - We’re transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.

A few of the benefits we offer:

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs. 
• Our Approach to Equity:  Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!). 
• 100%  Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck. 
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset. 
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.

If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. We’re building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring “Chainguardians'' with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard’s Privacy Policy.

©2025 Chainguard. All Rights Reserved.