Lead Designer Creative & Brand at Mercari

Mercari is Your Marketplace. We make it super easy to sell (or buy) almost anything. We all have things we don’t use, never used or simply outgrew. But that stuff still has value. Mercari gives you the power to simply sell it, ship it, and earn some cash for it. Fashion to toys. Sporting goods to electronics. All the brands you know and love. Our mission is simple: to make selling easier than buying. And with 50M+ downloads in the U.S. and 350k+ new listings every day, we're just getting started.

At Mercari, great ideas have a way of becoming innovative products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. 

We’re looking for a Lead Designer who shares our vision of creating a world where useful things are used. You’ll play a key role on the Creative & Brand team, developing creative work and design systems that support a diverse range of creative projects, and elevating how we connect our brand to our users through design. 

You have a passion for great design and for defining, evolving, and documenting flexible design systems that achieve bar-raising quality and consistency for the brand at scale. The ideal candidate excels across a variety of styles, crisply articulates design decisions, iterates quickly, and collaborates seamlessly with creatives, marketers, product managers, leaders, and agency partners.

You will:

• Evolve, expand, and maintain the design direction of the Mercari visual brand in partnership with other design leaders on the Creative & Brand, Marketing, and Product team
• Mentor junior designers, providing support to their work and growth
• Bring the brand to life in critical marketing moments, from campaigns systems to digital experiences
• Collaborate with designers, copywriters, producers, researchers, product managers, marketers, and other cross-functional partners to evolve our design systems to best connect and support our rapidly-growing customer base
• Work with external partners on creative strategy, guidance, execution, and production
• Help shape the strategic vision and goals for the Creative & Brand Design team
• Inspire, create and sustain a culture of excellence by defining and guiding functional and external partners in best practices, design process, and ideation

You are:

• A user-first designer who is fluent in design thinking and the latest digital design tools, including Figma and the Adobe creative suite
• Passionate about crafting digital experiences that tell stories that bring the brand to life for our customers.
• A natural collaborator and strong communicator who thrives in a fast paced environment
• Able to work on very broadly defined, loose concepts, and sometimes on narrowly defined, tactical deliverables, as well as work on long range goals and pivot to accommodate near term needs across a variety of surface areas
• Someone with proven excellence in brand-defining art direction and building and extending design systems
• Someone who is “always making”, pushing the boundaries of how we can use creative design to inspire and communicate what’s possible

What you’ll need: 

• Bachelor’s degree
• At least 2 years of creative direction and design leadership experience and,
• 6-8 years of relevant experience in strategy, information architecture, web design and creative technology experience at digital native agencies, and/or tech-forward, product-driven companies
• An online portfolio or compendium of example web projects you’ve worked on and led
• An expert understanding of the formal elements of design, not just limited to the web but including typography, layout, balance, and proportion
• An understanding of brand, marketing, and product design life cycles with the common roadblocks and challenges teams encounter
• The ability to connect business goals to team output and planning
• A desire to engage in new challenges with a growth mindset, and a knack for handling ambiguity
• Experience working in a fast-paced startup environment or agency (preferred, but not required)
• Ability to collaborate with the team and other departments in the office

Why Mercari?

Mercari nurtures an all for one environment where teamwork and innovative thinking is the priority.

Perks: 

• ‌Competitive ‌medical, dental, and vision insurance options
• 401k match
• Life & disability insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• New parent paid leave
• Rocket Lawyer legal services
• Fond perks and rewards
• Time when you need it - flexible vacation days