Creative Director

What you'll do

NinjaTrader is hiring a Creative Director to own how the company looks, sounds and feels across every marketing surface a consumer encounters. This is the senior-most creative role in the marketing organization, reporting directly to the CMO.

• Our brand strategy and positioning are sharp, but the visual expression lags behind..
• This is an opportunity to level up our visual identity to reflect the dynamic and growing nature of the brands we have in market.
• Then your job is to make it real - operationalize it, extend it into the places it doesn't yet reach, and defend it as volume scales.
• After that, you own the creative standard for the group.

• This is a hands-on leadership role.
• You will set direction, and you will still be in the file.
• We are not hiring someone to run a review calendar.

Trading is a category of noise: identical charts, identical claims, identical stock photography of men in headsets. The mandate is to make NinjaTrader unmistakable.

In this role you will

The marketing identity system

• Operationalize the incoming brand identity system - typography, color, photography and illustration direction, motion language, iconography, layout systems - and extend it into the surfaces it does not yet cover
• Own the marketing design system: build it to scale across campaign, web, lifecycle and partner surfaces, and to hold up when other hands use it
• Establish the governance that keeps the system intact - standards, documentation, review, and the authority to say no
• Act as the final quality gate on brand expression across marketing

Creative output and storytelling

• Concept and direct integrated campaigns from brief to launch - video, social, paid, OOH, sponsorship, events
• Develop the narrative, not just the look. You will shape the story a piece of video tells, then art-direct the production that delivers it
• Own marketing web and landing page design, including the pages that carry acquisition and conversion volume
• Direct lifecycle and product marketing creative so the experience stays coherent from first impression to funded account
• Stay personally in the work on hero projects - concepting, designing, writing direction, cutting with the editor

Team and partners

• Hire, manage and develop a small in-house design team; set the critique culture and the standard
• Brief, direct and evaluate agencies, production partners and freelancers; own creative quality of outsourced work
• Build the operating rhythm - briefs, reviews, handoffs - that lets a small team ship at volume
• Grow into broader creative ownership over time, including copy and video production

Cross-functional leadership

• Partner with Product Design on shared brand guidelines so marketing and platform surfaces stay recognizably the same brand. Product Design owns the product design system; you own the marketing one. The two are deliberately scoped differently and should stay that way
• Work with performance marketing to build creative that is testable, iterable and measured against funnel outcomes
• Operate fluently inside a regulated marketing environment, partnering with compliance early rather than treating review as a downstream tax

What you'll need

• 8+ years of brand and creative experience, with 2+ years leading a team as an ACD, CD or design lead
• A portfolio built on systems, not one-offs
• Storytelling range - able to develop narrative, not only art-direct someone else's script
• Range across brand campaign work and performance creative
• A desire to remain hands-on - actively driven to stay in the work, not just direct it
• Fluency with AI tooling in the creative process
• A track record of managing designers and directing external agencies
• Comfort with performance data

Bonus Points for

• Fintech, brokerage, trading, crypto or exchange experience, or genuine curiosity about markets and retail traders
• Experience operationalizing an inherited identity system rather than only building from scratch
• Experience running a marketing design system alongside a separately owned product design system
• Experience in a constrained or regulated environment - finance, healthcare, insurance, pharma or gaming
• Practicing a craft outside the day job - photography, film, writing or illustration
• Agency background plus in-house leadership experience

Compensation

The salary range for this role will be $166,000.00 - $216,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 15%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 23 days per year plus seven paid holidays.

Location

This role is based in Chicago, IL. *There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.

Hybrid

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer:

• 20 additional flex remote days annually
• 5 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays

Our Core Benefits Include

• Generous PTO
• 7 Paid Holidays Annually + 5 Conditional Holidays Annually
• 1 Service Day Annually
• 401k with 3.5% Company Match
• Paid Parental Bonding Leave
• Health, Vision, Dental Coverage
• Life and Disability Insurance Covered 100% by NinjaTrader