Director, Creative

Neo is building an AI cybersecurity brand from zero. No legacy templates, no inherited voice, no sacred cows. Just a category that badly needs a trusted leader with a point of view and a founding team ready to give it one.

We're hiring the first Director of Brand & Creative to build that voice, own the design language and brand visual system, and set the creative standard for every surface the market sees before, during, and after launch. This is a founding-level creative seat inside a new marketing department, not a maintenance job on an existing brand.

You'll work in close partnership with the Head of Marketing, Director of AI & Web Strategy, and an Events leader on digital experience and product storytelling, on every environmental, experiential, and stage-facing expression of the brand. You own the creative point of view; they own their domains. Together you make sure Neo looks and sounds like one company everywhere it shows up.

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What You'll Do

• Build the brand from the ground up: Contribute to name architecture, voice, visual identity, and narrative system for a category-defining launch, with a naming discipline that treats every product, series, and campaign as worth getting right.
• Own Brand Strategy to Advertising: apply a structured brand strategy framework (purpose, positioning, personality, promise) to set direction, then bring provocation-led thinking to campaign concepts - launches built to generate a reaction, not just an impression.
• Report and Partner with the CMO: Bring brand strategy and creative judgment into go-to-market strategy at the leadership table, not just execution.
• Set the Visual Language: Establish and maintain a distinctive brand design system built on the brand strategy, brand narrative, and creating memorable impact over decoration; not a template library, but a design language self-explanatory enough that a growing team can extend and evolve it without diluting it.
• Lead all Creative Execution: Website, product marketing and sales collateral, social, video, and merch, working directly with the Director of AI & Web Strategy, and Events, on how brand shows up across any channel.
• Direct Event Branding: Partner with the marketing and events team on conference presence, launch experiences, and internal team culture moments, from concept through production
• Translate Technical Subjects into Human Stakes: Cybersecurity is a human story of risk, disruption, and recovery, not a features list; anti-threat narratives (AI or otherwise) should read as before/during/after recovery arcs, not fear-based technical framing.
• Own Brand Digital Asset and Image Library: Organizing and maintaining it as a living resource and ecosystem the team can actually use, not an disparate archive nobody can find.
• Partner with Product & Engineering Design: Provide clear specs and assets on execution fidelity for product and web builds, to ensure what ships stays true to the original design intent and goal.
• Build Creative Network and Operations: freelancer, agency, and vendor management (printers, service agencies, advertising partner) to keep projects on time and on budget, while providing a fairly “self-service” brand design system (Figma and brand site) that gets sharper as the team grows and the brand evolves.

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What You Bring

• 10+ years in brand and creative leadership, with direct experience building a cybersecurity or enterprise technology brand from early stage through a major valuation event or exit.
• Demonstrated experience building and leading a team, not just contributing to one.
• A track record of taking a brand from category-generic to category-defining from: naming, positioning, and visual identity that a market remembers and leans into.
• Focused on outcomes, for users, the business, and the brand, not just output.
• A first-principles thinker who uses empathy for users and audience, building with a strong design intuition.
• Fluency in narrative systems and conceptual thinking, so every campaign starts with an idea that can be explained in one-to-two sentences, not a loose mood board.
• A distinct point of view on visual craft not matter the medium or substrate.
• Working knowledge of a brand strategy framework (purpose, positioning, personality, promise) and a provocation-marketing sensibility adapted for cybersecurity SaaS.
• Communicates with clarity and confidence, presenting your work and defend your thinking in the room while maintaining collaboration.
• Experience running creative team ops: briefing, managing, and reviewing work from freelancers and agencies at volume, with the precision to give feedback that actually sharpens the output.
• Comfortable supporting product design and solving problems outside your immediate lane when the team needs it.
• Comfort operating without a pre-defined playbook; stealth means ambiguity, and the right person treats that as room to build rather than a gap to complain about.
• Treats nothing as precious. You love iteration and regularly revisit your own work to make it better for the next cycle.
• Constantly checks personal and team priorities against the company's goals, and isn't shy about asking for help when something's uncertain.
• Brand Naming sensibility that allows you to give a product, blog series, or campaign a name with enough spine that it outlives the deck it was pitched in.
• Passionate, curious, contributing, and genuinely enjoyable to work with.
• Acts as a internal culture multiplier: contributes to the internal structures and culture of Neo's marketing and broader team, while helping guide the careers of the creatives and marketers you support, lead, and build with daily.

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Why This Seat

Most brand leadership roles inherit a system and defend it. This one starts with a semi-blank slate and a founding team that wants a creative partner, not an order-taker. If you've built a brand before and know exactly what you'd do differently with a second chance, this is that chance.