Associate Design Director

Instrument is a remote-first digital product and brand experience agency with over 200 talented people across four teams, each focused on a core offering and dedicated to producing best-in-class work. Our shift to a fully remote model has amplified our ability to foster creativity, build strong relationships, and engage with clients in dynamic ways. This flexibility has not only strengthened our company culture but also enabled us to embrace diverse perspectives. We remain deeply committed to career advancement, personal support, and ensuring a healthy work-life balance for everyone we hire.

Instrument partners with the world’s most ambitious companies to create transformational change through best-in-class digital products, brand and marketing projects. From day one, we’ve been committed to making this a place where people can make the best work of their career — sustainably. 

Designers at Instrument work on focused teams, together with strategists, writers, producers, and developers. Collaboration is more than a buzzword here; you’ll be working closely with colleagues and clients that have diverse perspectives and expertise. 

We're looking for an experienced visual and interactive designer obsessed with every detail of the craft. You use any visual means necessary to communicate ideas, and you’re willing to start anywhere, with anything, and iterate your way to the right solution. You’re highly strategic and passionate about prototyping, building, and continually evolving digital products and brand experiences.  You find inspiration in unlikely places and spread it throughout the room. You connect everything you do to the goals of the project, never getting distracted by something that doesn’t tie back. You do your best work when collaborating with strategists, writers, technologists, producers, and clients. You set the bar for design excellence and show your team something to aspire to. Everyone stretches to the top of their game when they work with you.

• Move quickly from thinking to doing. Give shape to bold ideas through execution.
• Establish the bar for design thinking and execution on the team, innovate best practices, and evolve the design practice through the work.
• Lead a project and team autonomously with limited process and hierarchy in place.
• Collaborate with designers, producers, developers, and clients to understand what a project needs at any given moment in an effort to move the work forward.
• Create smart and strategic thinking, illustrated by concise and articulate presentations.
• Make sense of complex systems and conjure inventive solutions through distillation and experimentation. 
• Ground the work in a deep understanding of the client and push on strategic insights to stretch creative opportunities. 
• Provide feedback to team members via creative reviews and mentor through the work.
• Work proactively to find solutions and maintain momentum in our projects. 
• Help the team adapt to evolving conditions and buoy others’ creative efforts.

• Demonstrated experience leading teams in shipping high impact, successful digital brand and marketing experiences
• Rock solid foundation in visual design, content creation, art direction, and brand design, with a strong understanding of motion in your work
• Strategic problem solving skills and the capacity to distill complex information into meaningful concepts or ideas
• Strong verbal and visual presentation skills that get across the process, approach, and impact of your design 
• A mind for best practices, paired with a willingness to try something just crazy enough to work
• Ability to move quickly to prove out ideas, and a learning mindset
• Expertise in current industry tools with the ability to adapt to new technologies
• Strong sense of ethics, and responsibility in understanding the way the work we do influences the world around us 
• Emotional maturity and awareness, utilizing multiple styles of communication and influence to come to the best result for our clients and team Curiosity, humility, and a passion for doing great work
• Experience working with photographers and helping concept and lead photoshoots is ideal

• The expected pay range for this position is $110,00 - $135,000 for our base US Region 3*. We have three regional pay ranges that are adjusted for cost of living (US1 +15%, US2 +7.5%, US3 Base), *learn more about our pay philosophy and cost of living adjustments.

What We Offer

Flexible, Hybrid Work Environment

Great Compensation with Annual Reviews (Learn more about our Pay Philosophy)

Annual Profit Sharing

401(k) Matching with Immediate Vesting

Robust Medical, Vision, and Accident Insurance

Generous Paid Holidays and unlimited PTO

Sabbaticals

Monthly Wellbeing Stipend

Career Management and Leadership Training