Creative Director

As Creative Director at NinjaTrader, you 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. You will set direction and remain hands-on in the work, operationalizing a sharpened brand strategy into a visual identity that cuts through the noise of the trading platform category and makes NinjaTrader unmistakable.

What you'll do

• Operationalize the incoming brand identity system-typography, color, photography and illustration direction, motion language, iconography, layout systems-and extend it into surfaces it does not yet cover
• Build and own the marketing design system, scaling it across campaign, web, lifecycle, and partner surfaces, and establish governance through standards, documentation, and review authority to keep the system intact
• Act as the final quality gate on brand expression across marketing
• Concept and direct integrated campaigns from brief to launch-video, social, paid, out-of-home, sponsorship, events
• Develop narrative and story, then art-direct production to deliver it; stay personally in the work on hero projects
• Own marketing web and landing page design, including high-volume acquisition and conversion pages
• Direct lifecycle and product marketing creative to maintain coherence from first impression to funded account
• Hire, manage, and develop a small in-house design team; set critique culture and creative 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
• Partner with Product Design on shared brand guidelines so marketing and platform surfaces remain recognizably the same brand
• 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 process

What you bring

• 8+ years of brand and creative experience, with 2+ years leading a team as an Associate Creative Director, Creative Director, 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 and actively engaged 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

Nice to have

• 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
• A craft practice outside the day job-photography, film, writing, or illustration
• Agency background plus in-house leadership experience

What we offer

• Salary range of $166,000-$216,000 USD plus an annual target bonus of 15%, based on individual performance (50%) and company/team performance (50%)
• 401(k) plan with company match up to 3.5% of employee contributions
• 23 days of paid time off annually plus 7 paid holidays
• Hybrid work schedule for Chicago-based employees: in-office Tuesday through Thursday, remote Monday and Friday, plus 20 additional flex remote days annually and 5 company-wide office-optional weeks tied to major holidays
• Remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in 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, and Wisconsin
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Health, vision, and dental coverage
• Life and disability insurance covered 100% by NinjaTrader
• 1 service day annually
• 5 conditional holidays annually

About NinjaTrader

NinjaTrader is an industry-leading trading platform and futures broker serving over 2 million users worldwide. The company is the number one rated futures brokerage globally and is committed to empowering retail traders with cutting-edge software, brokerage services, and real-time support to navigate financial markets with confidence.