The Team:

Upstart's Brand & Creative team shapes how the brand comes to life across every touchpoint - defining our voice, personality, and emotional connection with borrowers and partners. We sit within Growth, designing and creating for impact across all channels, from the digital surfaces where consumers first discover us to the campaigns and brand systems that make Upstart trusted and remembered.

As the Art Director, Performance at Upstart, you'll create high-impact creative across our Paid Social channels, including Meta, TikTok, Google, and emerging channels. Partnering closely with Marketing and Creative, you'll develop best-in-class work across evergreen and influencer programs with both in-house teams and external agency partners. You'll combine performance insights, channel best practices, and brand expertise to create innovative work that drives the future growth of Upstart.

How you'll make an impact

• Lead the creative vision and execution across Paid Social channels, ensuring design excellence, platform relevance, and brand consistency across all creative assets.
• Stay informed on performance and testing results, applying learnings to generate creative hypotheses, inform future assets, and proactively develop new creative tests.
• Partner cross-functionally and with external agencies to concept, design, and deliver best-in-class evergreen and influencer creative that drives measurable results.
• Strengthen creative systems and workflows to improve speed, scalability, consistency, and output as channels evolve.
• Apply generative AI throughout the creative process to accelerate ideation and asset development while maintaining strong creative judgment and oversight.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in art direction, design, or a related creative discipline.
• Portfolio demonstrating excellence in leading and executing best-in-class, high-impact performance creative across paid social channels.
• Strong knowledge of channel-specific creative best practices, with experience using performance data and structured testing to inform creative decisions, iterations, and future optimization.
• Expert-level proficiency in design software (Adobe Creative Suite and Figma), with experience using AI-assisted design tools and workflows.
• Bachelor's degree in Design, Visual Communications, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to organize and lead multiple projects and priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Skilled in collaborating with cross-functional partners and managing external agency or vendor relationships.
• Ability to clearly articulate creative decisions and recommendations to creative and non-creative stakeholders.
• Ability to translate business and performance goals into compelling creative strategies and concepts.
• Knowledge of copy development and how messaging supports creative concepts and executions.

Position location Remote

Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones.

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions' cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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