Senior Art Director, 2D Illustration

Whatnot is hiring a hands-on Art Director for 2D Illustration to help shape visual strategies and art direction across digital experiences and high-impact brand moments. This hybrid role in New York, NY brings together concept, craft, and production, with a team culture built around collaboration, momentum, and strong creative taste. With $158,000 - $200,000 per year and flexibility to work from home or global office hubs, you will contribute to work that connects with the Whatnot community across marketing campaigns, growth initiatives, events, and merchandise.

What you’ll do

• Develop visual strategies, art direction, and creative concepts to extend Whatnot’s brand across digital experiences, product launches, events, social, and other high-impact surfaces.
• Partner cross-functionally with designers, engineers, copywriters, marketers, and creative leads from initial brief to delivery.
• Move quickly from brief to execution, cutting scope when possible while maintaining a high standard of craft.
• Maintain and evolve visual strategies using moodboards and sketches to produce bespoke, production-ready assets.
• Bring meticulous attention to detail and provide actionable feedback in a productive, collaborative way.
• Help sustain a collaborative, positive environment that supports the team doing their best work.
• See projects through start to finish, including the ability to clearly verbalize concepts and narrative direction.
• Use tools such as Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, and AI workflows to communicate ideas, streamline processes, and improve turnaround time.
• Stay current on fashion and design trends, pop culture, commerce, creators, and the Whatnot community to build genuine connections across demographics.

What you bring

• 7+ years of experience across brand, campaign, or creative studio work, with a portfolio showing strong visual thinking and hands-on execution.
• Ability to simplify complex concepts into unique, intuitive, visually compelling metaphors.
• Strong point of view and experience communicating actionable feedback or guidance to teams.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-paced environments while maintaining high craft standards.
• Strong 2D design craft, art direction instincts, and ability to make smart creative calls with minimal guidance.
• Comfort experimenting and learning new skills while keeping up with design trends.
• Experience creating work for in-product experiences, visual identities, large-scale campaigns, social media, and merchandise or similar products and brands.
• Exceptional ability to communicate ideas, stories, and narratives through static and animated creative assets.
• Portfolio or presentation demonstrating high taste, strategy and knowledge, strong art direction, and polished illustration and graphic design solutions.
• Proficiency in Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, Figma Weave, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other creative tools.
• Proactive, curious, and self-motivated approach with a “figure it out” mindset.
• Meticulous ability to templatize, self-edit, and push for the best outcome.
• Experience leading creative work end-to-end with close collaboration across brand, product, engineers, and other partners.
• Low-ego, high-ownership mindset, strong feedback skills, and the ability to jump in hands-on when needed.
• Ability to refine ambiguous briefs, find the real problem, and create an actionable gameplan.
• Well-respected in the design community with strong ties to industry peers.

Flexibility, location, and tools

Work from home or from one of our global office hubs is supported, and in-person time is valued for planning and problem-solving. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of the San Francisco, New York, Seattle, or Los Angeles hubs.

Tools include Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, Figma Weave, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Benefits

• Generous holiday and time off policy
• Health insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home support
• Home office setup allowance
• Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
• Monthly allowance for wellness
• Annual allowance towards Childcare
• Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement: 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
• Parental Leave: 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work

Nice to have

• Experience in a high-growth startup, marketplace, consumer app, creator platform, or fast-moving creative studio
• Experience in art directing motion, illustration, design, or creating capsule collections in fashion
• Passion for AI tools and experimentation with vibe coding
• Experience building illustration systems for in-house creative teams
• Experience building creative tools to support a large-scale design organization

Important: Whatnot will only contact you through official @whatnot.com email addresses. If you receive an email impersonating a Whatnot recruiter, disregard and report it as spam.

EOE: Whatnot is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability, or any other status protected by local law.

Compensation Range: $158K - $200K