Creative Director

Instrument is a design and technology company. We build brands, products, and experiences that move businesses forward—by making the complex simple.

For over 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies like Google, ServiceNow, Uber, Eventbrite, and ŌURA, helping them navigate change, launch new ideas, and grow with intention.

Our work spans Brand, Marketing, and Product, but what defines us is how we work. We bring strategy, design, and engineering together from the start, moving quickly from idea to execution and refining as we go. We aim to do great work and be great to work with, because both matter.

We’re a collaborative, hands-on team with roots in Portland and New York and a distributed presence across the U.S. and Europe. We build teams around the needs of the work, staying nimble without sacrificing craft.

We value curiosity, perspective, and continuous learning, and we’re committed to building an inclusive environment where people can do their best work.

If that sounds like you, we’d love to meet you.

The Role Great creative leadership starts with a powerful idea – and the ability to make that idea stronger at every step.

As a Creative Director at Instrument, you’ll set the creative vision for ambitious work spanning brand, identity and design systems, web, and digital experiences. You’ll lead from the idea outward: shaping the concept, pushing the craft, inspiring multidisciplinary teams, and building the kind of client trust that allows great work to happen.

We’re looking for an exceptional conceptual thinker and brand leader—a creative generalist with high taste, strong creative conviction, and the presence to bring both teams and senior clients along with a vision. Your foundation is in brand and conceptual creative, but your range extends beyond any one discipline. You’re equally energized by building a brand from the ground up, evolving an identity system, shaping a digital experience, or finding the big idea that connects them all.

Depending on the needs of the work, this role may span multiple accounts or focus deeply on a single client partnership. In either case, you’ll have the opportunity to build meaningful client relationships, develop a deep understanding of their business, and shape the creative vision across a range of challenges.

What You'll Do

• Set and champion the creative vision across projects, developing big ideas that are strategically grounded, distinctive, and built to extend across different types of work.

• Lead creative across brand, identity and design systems, web, and digital experiences, creating a strong through-line from concept through execution.

• Maintain an exceptional bar for craft and originality, pushing the work and helping multidisciplinary teams deliver at their highest level.

• Serve as a senior creative partner to clients, confidently presenting and selling ideas, navigating feedback and ambiguity, and building trust with senior stakeholders.

• Lead and inspire multidisciplinary teams, bringing designers, writers, strategists, technologists, and producers together around a shared creative vision.

• Balance multiple projects and creative workstreams while maintaining consistency, momentum, and quality.

• Contribute to new business and account growth by shaping creative approaches, identifying opportunities, and helping turn ambitious ideas into compelling pitches and expanded partnerships.

What You'll Bring

• Significant experience leading creative at an agency, studio, or similarly multidisciplinary environment, with demonstrated ownership of the creative vision from concept through execution.

• An exceptional portfolio demonstrating big conceptual thinking, brand and identity work, and a consistently high bar for visual craft.

• Deep expertise in brand and conceptual creative, paired with credible...