Brand Designer - Brand Foundations

The team

Payward is building the financial infrastructure on cryptorails that enables people to own the power of their money. Millions of people across 100+ countries encounter that mission through our brands including Kraken, Krak, NinjaTrader, Breakout and many more.

The Brand Foundations team makes all of it coherent: the brand guidelines, brand architecture, AI-native brand ops, templates, assets, and systems that every product pod draws from.

This role sits at the center of that. You're the standard-setter. The person who makes it easier for every pod to ship great brand work by giving them better tools, clearer guidance, and a higher bar to aim for.

The opportunity

• Own and evolve the core brand system: brand guidelines, component libraries, templates, and asset libraries that product pods rely on every day.

• Raise brand quality across pods. Not by policing, but by showing the way. You build the resources and create the conditions for others to do their best brand work.

• Develop and maintain visual identity standards across Payward's portfolio of brands, keeping them coherent as products grow and evolve.

• Define and document how our brand should behave across emerging surfaces, AI generated outputs, motion and new product categories. Before ambiguity becomes inconsistency.

• Collaborate with pod designers, marketers, and product partners to understand where the system is breaking down and fix it at the root, not the symptom.

• Translate complex concepts i.e. crypto rails, onchain finance, institutional trading; into clear, usable brand guidance that non-brand specialists can apply with confidence.

• Lead design reviews with a constructive, generative approach: your feedback opens doors, it doesn't close them.

• Stay ahead of how design tools (including AI) are changing creative practice, and shape how Payward's brand system adapts.

What you bring

• Deep experience as a brand designer in agency, in-house, or both. With a track record of building and evolving systems, not just executing within them.

• Systems thinking as a default mode. You see patterns, spot structural problems, and solve for the whole rather than the instance.

• Strong experience with motion or working alongside motion designers; comfort with the full range of digital brand touchpoints.

• Brand identity expertise: you understand how visual systems create meaning, trust, and recognition at scale.

• Strategic affinity — you're comfortable working upstream of execution, helping define what the brand should stand for before anyone opens Figma.

• A strong communicator who can articulate brand decisions clearly to designers, PMs, marketers, and leadership alike.

• A portfolio showing not just craft, but judgment: clear visual systems, coherent brand thinking, and evidence that your work made others' work better.

• Mastery of Figma and Adobe Creative Suite; fluency with how design tooling, including AI, is reshaping brand practice.

• Genuine curiosity about crypto, technology, and what financial ownership means for individuals around the world.