Founding Brand Designer

About the role

You will own the end-to-end visual identity of Basis, translating a complex agent narrative into a cohesive and recognizable brand world that signals credibility and ambition to customers and builders alike. You will define the visual language that makes the work of automating accounting feel tangible, trustworthy, and human. This role requires you to balance a high-level category-defining ambition with the granular details of templates, components, and customer touchpoints. You will act as both a strategic storyteller and a hands-on designer, moving fluidly from sketch to production-ready asset. Your work will underpin every go-to-motion, ensuring that the customer brand and the technical brand remain distinct yet harmonious. You will shape perception across a fragmented market by making the abstract concrete and the technical approachable. This is a rare opportunity to build the foundational design system for a company that is redefining an entire industry.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect a complete visual identity for Basis that communicates the sophistication of AI agents working within the real economy and the specific needs of accounting professionals.
• Translate ambiguous market positioning and technical complexity into a clear visual narrative that sales, marketing, and customers can immediately understand and use.
• Design the foundational brand system, including color, typography, motion, and imagery, ensuring it scales across multiple buyer personas and go-to-market strategies.
• Build and govern a design system that serves as the operating backbone for the brand, enabling speed and consistency through reusable templates and components.
• Partner with Demand Generation to craft campaign concepts that feel integrated, whether they live on the website, in email, at events, or within sales materials.
• Elevate the editorial experience for customer stories, reports, and thought leadership content, making dense financial and technical information feel accessible and compelling.
• Collaborate directly with product and engineering to ensure that digital experiences, from landing pages to dashboards, reflect the brand with precision and care.
• Guide external partners, including agencies and freelancers, to maintain a high standard of quality and coherence as the design organization scales.
• Define the visual language for recruiting campaigns, helping the brand attract top-tier design and engineering talent who are excited by mission-critical work.
• Establish clear standards and documentation that protect the brand while giving internal teams the tools to execute independently and consistently.
• Use data and user feedback to continuously refine the visual system, ensuring it supports conversion, trust, and comprehension over time.
• Lead high-stakes projects from discovery to delivery, balancing creative exploration with the practical constraints of production timelines and technical feasibility.

Requirements

• 5-8 years of experience in brand design, visual design, or creative direction within a high-growth software, AI, fintech, or technical product environment.
• A portfolio that demonstrates a complete brand system, showing how you turned complex products and abstract ideas into distinctive and strategic creative concepts.
• Exceptional taste and judgment across typography, composition, color theory, hierarchy, image direction, and visual storytelling.
• Strong digital design expertise, with a proven track record of shipping responsive web experiences in close collaboration with engineering and product teams.
• Extensive experience building and maintaining design systems, templates, and standards that adapt across multiple buyers and motions without fragmenting the brand.
• The confidence to form a strong point of view, defend design decisions with rationale, and incorporate feedback to iteratively improve work.
• A demonstrated ability to learn complex products, buyer workflows, and technical markets quickly and deeply.
• Comfort working in an environment that values speed, clarity, and business impact, where design decisions directly influence revenue and operations.

Nice to have

• Category-Defining Brand Work: A history of visual identities that helped a company claim a distinct and defensible place in the market.
• Website Depth: Experience leading the design of a B2B website from strategic narrative and information architecture through final visual execution and interaction details.
• Campaign Concepts: The ability to create integrated campaign ideas that retain their power across digital, editorial, social, events, and sales collateral.
• Editorial Taste: A strong sense of how to structure and style reports, customer stories, and thought leadership so that complex information feels clear and worth reading.
• System That Compounds: A track record of building design systems, components, and workflows where every asset makes future work faster and stronger.
• AI-Native Creative Practice: A thoughtful and intentional approach to leveraging AI tools to accelerate design workflows, explore concepts, and push creative boundaries without sacrificing quality.

Practical notes

The role is based in the Flatiron office in New York City. This is an in-person position requiring attendance five days a week.