Circle - Creative Director

• A body of work you’re genuinely proud of. We care far more about what you’ve made than the titles you’ve held or the number of years you’ve been doing it. You should be able to walk us through your best work piece by piece: the problem, the idea, the choices you made, what you personally contributed, and ultimately, whether it worked. • A body of work you’re genuinely proud of. • Exceptional creative taste and judgment. You know great work when you see it, can articulate why it’s great, and have the conviction to push work until it gets there. Just as importantly, you know when an idea is trying too hard, when something is off-brand, and when your own fingerprints are making the work worse rather than better. • Exceptional creative taste and judgment. • You’re an exceptional storyteller and writer. You can take something complicated and find the simple, compelling story inside it. You care deeply about language and will happily obsess over a headline, a launch narrative, or a single line of copy until it feels inevitable. • You’re an exceptional storyteller and writer. • A strong point of view, and the ability to make it better through collaboration. We don’t want someone who waits for a brief and executes it. We want someone who can tell us what the brief should be, challenge the premise when necessary, elevate ideas coming from the team and our founders, and make a compelling case for a different direction. • A strong point of view, and the ability to make it better through collaboration. • Real fluency in video as a creative medium. You don’t need to shoot, edit, animate, or produce. But you should deeply understand what makes video work, from the script and opening seconds to structure, pacing, emotion, and payoff. You should also understand why a great launch film, social video, customer story, and paid ad require very different creative choices. • Real fluency in video as a creative medium. • Experience making creative that has to perform. You’ve developed ads and campaigns where the work was ultimately accountable to results. You’ve seen the numbers, learned from them, iterated because of them, and know how to partner with paid acquisition teams without allowing performance marketing to turn into boring marketing. • Experience making creative that has to perform. • An instinct for getting attention without going off script. You understand how to make a brand noticeable, surprising, and culturally relevant without chasing attention for its own sake. Ideally, you can show us a creative risk you fought for that worked, and another you talked the room out of because it wasn’t right for the brand. • An instinct for getting attention without going off script. • The ability to lead through influence, not hierarchy. There’s no large creative organization reporting to you. Much of your impact will come from getting exceptional work out of designers, marketers, writers, video producers, agencies, and founders who don’t report to you. You know how to raise the creative bar without becoming a bottleneck. • The ability to lead through influence, not hierarchy. • A great eye for design and deep respect for the craft. You don’t need to be a designer, but you should be able to work shoulder-to-shoulder with exceptional ones. Our Design Studio is led by a co-founder and operates with a very high bar; you’ll need the visual taste, vocabulary, and collaborative instincts to be a trusted creative partner to that team. • A great eye for design and deep respect for the craft. • Experience working closely with founders. You’re comfortable working with founders who care deeply about the product, brand, and details. You will need to extract the vision, challenge it when needed, and turn it into something better than either of you would have arrived at independently. • Experience working closely with founders. • An obsession with understanding what how to tell the world about we do and why it matters. The best creative work here will come from understanding Circle at a deep level: our product, customers, competitors, category, and where the market is going. You should genuinely enjoy developing that level of context rather than treating it as somebody else’s job. • An obsession with understanding what how to tell the world about we do and why it matters. • Exceptional communication skills. Circle is global, remote, and highly asynchronous. You’ll need outstanding written and verbal English (CEFR C2 or equivalent), and the ability to make your thinking clear enough that great work can move forward even when everyone isn’t in the same room.