Sr Brand Designer - Brand Foundations

Building the Future of Open Finance

Payward — the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks — has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

The Team

Payward is building the financial infrastructure on cryptorails that enables people to own the power of their money. Millions of people across 100+ countries encounter that mission through our brands including Kraken, Krak, NinjaTrader, Breakout and many more.

The Brand Foundations team makes all of it coherent: the brand guidelines, brand architecture, AI-native brand ops, templates, assets, and systems that every product pod draws from.

This role sits at the center of that. You're the standard-setter. The person who makes it easier for every pod to ship great brand work by giving them better tools, clearer guidance, and a higher bar to aim for.

The Opportunity

• Own and evolve the core brand system: brand guidelines, component libraries, templates, and asset libraries that product pods rely on every day.
• Raise brand quality across pods. Not by policing, but by showing the way. You build the resources and create the conditions for others to do their best brand work.
• Develop and maintain visual identity standards across Payward's portfolio of brands, keeping them coherent as products grow and evolve.
• Define and document how our brand should behave across emerging surfaces, AI generated outputs, motion and new product categories before ambiguity becomes inconsistency.
• Collaborate with pod designers, marketers, and product partners to understand where the system is breaking down and fix it at the root.
• Translate complex concepts (crypto rails, onchain finance, institutional trading) into clear, usable brand guidance that non-brand specialists can apply with confidence.
• Lead design reviews with a constructive, generative approach: your feedback opens doors.
• Stay ahead of how design tools (including AI) are changing creative practice, and shape how Payward's brand system adapts.

What You Bring

• Deep experience as a brand designer in agency, in-house, or both, with a track record of building and evolving systems.
• Systems thinking as a default mode. You see patterns, spot structural problems, and solve for the whole rather than the instance.
• Strong experience with motion or working alongside motion designers; comfort with the full range of digital brand touchpoints.
• Brand identity expertise: you understand how visual systems create meaning, trust, and recognition at scale.
• Strategic affinity — comfortable working upstream of execution, helping define what the brand should stand for before anyone opens Figma.
• Strong communication skills to articulate brand decisions clearly to designers, PMs, marketers, and leadership.
• A portfolio showing craft, judgment, clear visual systems, and coherent brand thinking.
• Mastery of Figma and Adobe Creative Suite; fluency with how design tooling and AI are reshaping brand practice.
• Genuine curiosity about crypto, technology, and what financial ownership means for individuals around the world.