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