Creative Director

Opening ManifestoMural is regulated financial infrastructure that fintechs, platforms, and banks build on to serve financial products to their end users across the US, Latin America, and beyond. We've processed over $2 billion across US dollar, stablecoin, and international rails. Customers include Deel, Bolt, Opera, Koywe, Uniswap, Movii, and more. We're an AI-native company: agentic tools are how we build, operate, and scale.Banking software looks the way it does because nobody has been given permission to question it. Every bank, every fintech, every "neobank" inherits the same visual language, the same information density, the same forms and tables and dashboards — because the category has never had a designer sit down and ask why. We're redesigning what a regulated financial institution looks like from first principles. That's not just a strategic bet, it's the opportunity to design a bank the way it's never been designed before, with nothing inherited and nothing sacred.In a world where AI has commoditized content — every channel saturated with competent, forgettable "meh" — taste is the only thing left that can't be prompted into existence. That's the actual alpha here. This role is a bet on one person's taste, obsession, and desire to build a generational brand. We're not hiring a design manager. We're hiring the person whose eye becomes Mural's.We've been engineering-led from day one, and it shows: our product is best-in-class, our brand and interface are not yet what they should be. We have just closed a strong funding round, GTM is scaling, and we're about to put a real brand in front of the market for the first time. Right now that work is scattered across founders, an outside agency, and whoever has 20 minutes.You're the person who owns Mural's visual identity, brand, and interface end to end, from zero.The RoleYou own brand, creative direction, and interface design end to end, reporting to the CEO. Visual identity system, website, investor and sales materials, social/content presence, event and merch design, the creative brief for anything customer-facing — and the product interface itself, working directly with engineering to rethink what a banking product should look and feel like. You're not managing an agency relationship at arm's length — you're doing the design work yourself and building the team under you as it grows.This is not a maintain-the-brand-guidelines role, and it's not a skin-the-existing-dashboard role:You'll question everything the category takes for granted. Why does every banking product look like a spreadsheet with a logo on it? You're here to answer that differently, not inherit the answer.You'll build the brand system from a near-blank slate. Mural's visual identity today is inconsistent and under-invested — you define it.You'll ship fast and ship yourself. Working files and finished assets, not just creative direction handed to a vendor.You'll work AI-natively — and it works for you. Agentic and generative tools (Claude among them) handle a huge share of the production grind: drafts, variations, first passes, grunt execution. That's not a threat to the role, it's leverage — it means your time goes almost entirely to taste and judgment, the part AI can't do. You'll direct that firepower, not compete with it.You'll partner directly with GTM, engineering, and the CEO on interface, investor materials, launch content, and narrative — brand, product, and business strategy aren't separate conversations here.How You'll WorkWith the CEO: brand voice and visual direction is set in close partnership with Sinclair — you form a point of view and defend it, not just execute requests.With engineering/product: this is the closest partnership in the role — you own the interface itself, not just the marketing wrapper around it, working directly with the product leads to rethink flows, density, and interaction from scratch.With GTM/BD: you own the creative for sales collateral, customer case studies, and event presence; BD owns the relationship, you own how it looks and reads.With external partners: Mural has worked with outside branding/creative agencies — you decide what stays in-house vs. stays outsourced going forward.What We're Looking ForObsession over pedigree. We're looking for a specific type of creative person: completely consumed by their craft, restless with energy, allergic to "good enough." Some of the best people we'd want for this don't come from tech at all — they founded something unrelated and it didn't work out, they made independent films, they were community organizers, they grew an audience from nothing on pure instinct. If that's you, you're exactly who this is for.A portfolio that shows first-principles thinking, not just polish. We want to see a project where you threw out the category's conventions and started over — not just a beautiful execution of an expected pattern.No fintech or blockchain experience required. We'd rather have someone who has never designed a banking product and has no idea what one is "supposed" to look like, than someone fluent in the conventions we're trying to break.Hands-on, not just directorial. You should still want to be in Figma/design tools yourself, especially in year one.Comfortable owning interface, not just brand. This role spans brand identity and product UI/UX — you don't need to be a full-time product designer, but you need real conviction about how software should look, feel, and behave.AI-native. Comfortable using generative tools for speed without losing quality or a distinct point of view — you're the type constantly tinkering with Claude Code and whatever's newest, not waiting for it to become mainstream.High taste bar, fast execution. We move at startup speed — you need both.Content and storytelling instincts, strongly preferred. Not a hard requirement, but a real plus: experience with content marketing and genuine skill as a storyteller — visual or written, either works — someone who can shape a narrative, not just a layout.A personal website with your own projects on it, strongly preferred. We want to see how you think and build when nobody assigned it — side projects, experiments, writing, whatever you've made because you wanted to.Loose guardrails, not tight process, is how we want to manage you. We'll tell you the metric, the constraint, and why it matters — then get out of your way. Some of what you make won't land. That's the deal: the swings that don't work are the cost of the ones that do.People we expect to thrive here have shaped how a product or brand feels at a company known for incredible design — places like Ramp, ElevenLabs, Apple, Clay, Dyson, Linear, The Browser Company (Arc), Superhuman, Notion, Figma, Nike, or Cash App/Block — or have built something with that same first-principles sensibility on their own. The company doesn't need to be a fintech. The sensibility does need to be exceptional.Compensation & BenefitsCompetitive cash base salaryMeaningful early-stage equityHealth insurance401(k)Visa sponsorship availableLocationNew York City, in person preferred. Open to discussing remote for an exceptional fit.