Creative Director

Rune; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Rune is seeking a Creative Director to shape the look and feel of RELIC, governing the industrial design language across generations and the brand system. You will lead the design, environments, and product storytelling, collaborating with engineering, manufacturing, and marketing to ensure a cohesive voice and visuals.

As the first design hire, you will build the function from scratch, translating hardware form into compelling communications, decks, investor materials, and press-ready assets

Qualifications

• 5+ years spanning industrial design and brand or marketing leadership, with a portfolio of shipped physical products.
• Formal industrial design training; fluent in 3D/CAD, materials, and manufacturing processes, and able to hold design intent in engineering trade-off conversations.
• Has built a brand around hardware: took a physical product from design language through launch and demand generation.
• Excellent marketer with demonstrated commercial results - campaigns, launches, and content that created measurable demand.
• Range across mediums: identity systems, web, film and photo direction, spatial design, and document design.

Responsibilities

• Own the industrial design language of the RELIC and carry it coherently across product generations.
• Work directly with engineering and manufacturing so design intent aligns with DFM, cost targets, and the realities of outdoor, utility-scale sites.
• Build and maintain Rune's brand system, including identity, typography, color, photo and film direction, and publish the guidelines, templates, and asset library the whole company works from.
• Design the document layer: pitch decks, data sheets, one-pagers, investor materials, and customer deliverables, partnering with our documentation function on content.
• Own the website: structure, design, and copy standards, kept current as products and sites launch.
• Partner with our press/PR agency to build the story and announcement calendar, write and review briefs and releases, prep spokespeople, and host press at deployments.
• Support marketing end to end: positioning, narrative, website, content, launches, film and photography, events, and press.
• Design Rune's physical environments (headquarters, manufacturing floor, and sites) to the same standard as the product.
• Direct agencies, photographers, and fabricators to bring the vision to the field.

Skills

Industrial Design

Brand Leadership

Marketing Leadership

Education

Bachelor's in Industrial Design

Tools

3D CAD

Materials & Manufacturing

DFM

Job description

Every solar and wind power plant is a latent data center. Rune connects power to the compute that needs it. Solar plants generate electricity the grid can't take: clipped by inverters, curtailed by operators, gone before it ever reaches a meter. Meanwhile, AI needs more power than new construction can deliver in time.

Rune is building the fastest path to gigawatts of compute. Our product, RELIC, plugs directly into clean energy assets to deliver AI inference compute - no grid connection, no construction, and deployment in weeks. It's a radically simpler model: compute that comes online faster, costs a fraction of a traditional AI data center, and scales as fast as we can manufacture it.

We're backed by Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Committed Capital, Timeless Partners, and Logos Fund.

The Role:

As Creative Director, you will own how Rune looks and how Rune is seen: the industrial design of the RELIC, the brand system and documents, the spaces we work in, and the launches, campaigns, and press that help communicate with our stakeholders. You are our first design hire, an industrial designer with intuition on brand, and you will build this function from scratch as the company scales around it.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the industrial design language of the RELIC and carry it coherently across product generations. A RELIC in a solar field should read as Rune at a glance.
• Work directly with engineering and manufacturing so design intent aligns with DFM, cost targets, and the realities of outdoor, utility-scale sites.

Brand & Identity

• Build and maintain Rune's brand system, including identity, typography, color, photo and film direction, and publish the guidelines, templates, and asset library the whole company works from.
• Design the document layer: pitch decks, data sheets, one-pagers, investor materials, and customer deliverables, partnering with our documentation function on content.
• Own the website: structure, design, and copy standards, kept current as products and sites launch.

Marketing

• Partner with our press/PR agency to build the story and announcement calendar, write and review briefs and releases, prep spokespeople, and host press at deployments.
• Support marketing end to end: positioning, narrative, website, content, launches, film and photography, events, and press..

Environments & Team

• Design Rune's physical environments (headquarters, manufacturing floor, and sites) to the same standard as the product.
• Direct agencies, photographers, and fabricators to bring the vision to the field.

Ideal Qualifications:

• 5+ years spanning industrial design and brand or marketing leadership, with a portfolio of shipped physical products.
• Formal industrial design training; fluent in 3D/CAD, materials, and manufacturing processes, and able to hold design intent in engineering trade-off conversations.
• Has built a brand around hardware: took a physical product from design language through launch and demand generation.
• Excellent marketer with demonstrated commercial results - campaigns, launches, and content that created measurable demand.
• Range across mediums: identity systems, web, film and photo direction, spatial design, and document design.

What We Offer:

• Competitive base and strategic ownership in what we believe will be one of the largest infrastructure build-outs of the decade.

Rune is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.