Design Taste Lead Remote-first (US timezone overlap) · $130,000 – $170,000 base Read the full role →

Creytix; United States; Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity 0.3%–0.7%

Remote work: US-remote

Job summary

Creytix is seeking a design-forward leader to own and enforce taste across our brand fleet. You will define visual directions before wireframes and curate a rule-driven critique system to ensure consistently high-quality design across multiple brands.

The role emphasizes restraint, typography mastery, and the ability to defend design decisions within a design system. Remote-first with lead-level influence on the fleet’s visual language.

Qualifications

• A portfolio showing restrained, credible design across real brands.
• Ability to articulate why something is wrong and turn it into a rule.
• Comfortable working inside a design system and extending it.

Responsibilities

• Own the taste critic and brand DNA controls that gate what ships across the fleet.
• Review work against the critic and improve the critic when it disagrees with you and you're right.
• Curate the reference library that trains judgment — typed, sourced, and legally clean.
• Set the visual direction for new brands before a wireframe exists.
• Say no to work that passes every automated gate and is still bad.

Skills

Portfolio review

Design system familiarity

Typography and hierarchy

Defense of design decisions

Brand identity work

Motion and interaction design

Job description

We build a lot of sites fast, with a lot of machine assistance, and the default failure mode of that is work that is competent and completely generic. We treat taste as a scoring function — brand fit, hierarchy, restraint, consistency, interaction quality, minus the tells of AI-generated design — and someone has to own it and be right.

What you'll do

• Own the taste critic and the brand DNA locks that gate what ships across the fleet
• Review work against the critic, and improve the critic when it disagrees with you and you're right
• Curate the reference library that trains our judgment — typed, sourced, and legally clean
• Set the visual direction for new brands before a wireframe exists
• Say no to work that passes every automated gate and is still bad

What we need from you

• A portfolio where the restraint is visible and the range is real
• You can articulate why something is wrong specifically enough that it becomes a rule
• Comfortable working inside a design system and extending it rather than starting over per project
• Opinionated about typography and hierarchy in a way you can defend

Nice to have

• Front-end skills — enough to change it rather than annotate it
• Brand identity work
• Motion and interaction design

Your first 90 days

• Week 1–2: audit the live fleet and rank every surface by how generic it reads
• Week 3–8: fix the worst offenders and turn each fix into a rule the critic enforces
• By day 90: owning direction on new brands, with the critic measurably catching what you'd catch

Compensation

Base

$130,000 – $170,000

Equity

0.3% – 0.7%

Base is US-remote, at lead level. You own a scoring function the whole fleet ships against, not a queue of screens.