AI Creative Director

Valid; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Valid is a product-driven creative company with an in-house engineering team. We seek a senior leader to align client growth, creative performance, and internal execution to deliver measurable wins across accounts.

Your role emphasizes understanding client needs, redirecting strategy when needed, and shaping work into high-performing outcomes. This position requires hands-on leadership and rapid decision-making in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Senior strategic voice on key accounts with deep client understanding.
• Ability to build testing plans and identify growth levers.
• Proven leadership of internal teams to move quickly.
• Strong communication and client persuasion capabilities.

Responsibilities

• You will be the senior strategic voice on key accounts, understanding each client’s business, offer, funnel, and performance landscape.
• Build testing plans around real account opportunities, identify which hooks/offers/formats/angles should be attacked next, and steer concepts toward performance over preference.
• Lead internal creatives, editors, strategists, and producers with speed and clarity, converting client conversations into actionable briefs and keeping production moving.
• Pitch concepts persuasively, defend strategic choices, and expand client trust to drive long-term retention.

Job description

A little about us: We’re Valid, Valid isn’t just a performance or content agency. We’re a product-driven creative company with an in-house engineering team that builds tools to test, learn, and scale what works. We combine strategy, creative, and AI to turn insights into systems, helping brands move faster and make better decisions across every channel.

The Role

This is a senior leadership role for someone who can sit at the center of client growth, creative performance, and internal execution, and make all three move faster.

Your job is not simply to oversee deliverables.

Your job is to make sure the work we put into client accounts wins.

That means understanding the client’s business deeply, recognizing that what they ask for is not always what they actually need, and having the strategic confidence to redirect, refine, and shape the work into something that outperforms what is already running.

You must be equally comfortable:

• building testing strategy,
• pitching directly to clients,
• managing high-level relationships,
• pushing back when necessary,
• and translating all of that into clear internal execution.

This is a hands-on operator role.

You cannot lead this from above.

You must know how to build strategy, create strong concepts, understand AI production, and step into the work yourself when needed. The team should move faster because your expertise is in the room.

This role sits at the intersection of:

creative leadership, performance strategy, client trust, and speed.

The pace is aggressive.

What You’ll Actually Own

Client Strategy & Relationship Leadership

You will be the senior strategic voice on key accounts.

That means understanding each client’s business model, offer, funnel, and performance landscape, knowing what is working and failing in their account, and identifying where creative can become the growth lever.

Clients will often tell us what they think they need.

Your job is to identify the real problem underneath the ask and guide them toward the right solution.

You should be able to command trust quickly, pitch with confidence, and build relationships that make clients want to follow your lead.

Creative Performance Direction

You are responsible for ensuring the creative strategy is built to outperform.

This means:

• building testing plans around real account opportunities,
• identifying which hooks, offers, formats, and angles should be attacked next,
• steering concepts toward performance over subjective preference,
• and making sure every batch of work has a strategic reason for existing.

You are not approving ads because they look good.

You are approving ads because you understand why they should win.

The expectation is simple: our work should beat what the client was running before we got there.

Internal Team Leadership

You will lead internal creatives, editors, strategists, and producers with speed and clarity.

You must be able to take a messy client conversation, extract the strategic signal, convert it into actionable briefs, sharpen weak ideas, and keep production moving without bottlenecks.

You are the connective tissue between client expectation and final output.

Pitching, Selling & Expanding Trust

This role is highly outward-facing.

You should be able to present concepts persuasively, defend strategic choices, handle skepticism, and continually reinforce that we know how to make accounts perform.

Strong communication matters here as much as strong creative instinct.

Long-term retention often comes down to whether the client believes we see opportunities they do not.

Who This Is For

This is for someone who:

• understands performance creative deeply,
• thinks strategically beyond what is asked,
• can lead clients without becoming a yes-person,
• can lead teams without babysitting,
• can pitch with conviction,
• and thrives in a fast, demanding environment.

This is not a clock-in, clock-out role.

Priorities shift. Problems appear. Speed matters.

The people who thrive here are the ones who know how to solve, adapt, and keep moving.