Staff Marketing Designer, Retail Creative

About Shopify

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 10,000 employees and generated over $500 billion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. Every 28 seconds, an entrepreneur on Shopify makes their first sale.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About you
Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion — and embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward

NOTE: Only applicants who submit a portfolio of design work alongside application will be considered.

The Shopify Retail Creative team is seeking a Staff Marketing Designer to join our cross-discipline Creative team made up of visual designers, content designers, front end developers, and more. Our team’s mission is to help Shopify reach our retail audience: the spectrum of merchants on our platform who sell in-person. We’re a diverse team of smart, caring, and committed Creative specialists. We use a human-centered approach to design thoughtful and memorable experiences that create awareness for our retail products as well as help merchants already on our platform succeed . We use design thinking to solve marketing problems, and collaborate within the broader Retail group, including Product and UX,  to develop and produce engaging creative work via digital and IRL experiences.. 

The right candidate is a strategic designer and leader with a strong point of view, who is also comfortable getting into the weeds and working directly with their team to build effective marketing experiences for future and current Shopify merchants. As a Staff Marketing Designer, you’ll help shape Shopify’s look and feel across marketing touchpoints, tackling projects that span digital, print, experiential, and more. You’ll become an expert and champion of our retail business and elevate the visual expression of our brand in meaningful and relevant ways. 

This is a leadership role on our team, though not directly managing people. At Shopify, leaders thrive on change and can navigate ambiguity in order to move our team vision and company mission forward. They operate on trust, leveraging diverse perspectives in everything they do. They must be comfortable working in a cross-functional and fast-paced environment. In this role, you’ll help level up our design team with your advanced visual design skills, deep understanding of audience and strategy, and your ability to articulate design thinking to your team and stakeholders across the org. 

As a Staff Marketing Designer you’ll lead design projects of significant scope, complexity and responsibility in creative vision, strategy and execution. You’ll work closely with our marketing and product counterparts to shape initiatives of all sizes and collaborate with multidisciplinary front end development, conten markeingt, and video production teams to deliver user-centered, industry-leading design work. 

If this sounds like you, and you’re excited to work in a friendly, collaborative environment, we’d love to hear from you. 

• Proven experience compelling campaign experiences through a variety of mediums.

• Facilitate cross-team communications.

• Ensure our output always aligns with our business goals.

• Collaborate cross-functionally to develop creative marketing strategies that ladder up to a brief. You’ll work with internal teams as well as with external vendors, suppliers, and agencies.

• Have experience working with product design teams as well as telling product-oriented stories.

• You have an aptitude for approaching the work from a user-centric perspective.

• Provide craft leadership via mentoring and participating in team rituals. You’ll help bring out the best in a designer's individual work and contribute to a great design culture across the organization.

• Be a constant learner and experimenter to help improve your craft.

• Applying strategic thinking to visualize ideas and concepts and communicate them effectively and compellingly.

• You bridge words and visual systems, communicate ideas in a compelling way, and create emotion for our audiences 

• Your designs are data-informed and their impact is measurable.

• You can tell a story about your work in a way that not only yields understanding of intention and decision-making behind the result, but also resonates with stakeholders adjacent to your core craft. 

Leadership

• You’ll be an active mentor for designers, helping lead critiques and design reviews.

• Using facilitative leadership skills to drive to the best outcome for stakeholders, partners, and customers.

• You’ve owned projects from start to finish and have proven experience working cross-functionally in a matrixed environment. Your partners have included product design, research, development, SEO, video production and content marketing.

• You understand that leadership is a craft, and know how to mentor your team members to help them grow and succeed. 

• Deep experience with driving and applying user-centered design processes while working with cross-functional teams including development, product management, marketing, and research.

Collaboration

• Working with cross-functional teams to drive design vision and strategy that meets the needs of our users.

• Building positive, collaborative relationships with product management, development, marketing, and the broader Creative team, as well as continuously "raising the bar" as an effective leader of positive change.

• Working closely with the PMM and Product stakeholders on your projects to balance technical, business, and user requirements.

• An understanding that great experiences come from collaborative decision-making with marketers, developers, researchers, content marketers, video production and other disciplines including other creative teams.

Craft

• A keen eye for good design and attention to detail.

• Providing technical and strategic brand and user-centric design on marketing efforts.

• The desire to drive creative through an end-to-end UX process, including research, ideation, iteration, and validation.

• A passion for solving design problems while wearing multiple hats and owning all facets of design ( wire-framing, art direction, and interaction design).

• Exceptional visual design skills shown through an extensive portfolio of projects.

• Excellent communication and storytelling skills; you have the ability to help your team and stakeholders understand the “why” behind your design rationale.

Process

• Adjust quickly to shifting approaches, situations, and priorities.

• Passion for unpacking and solving complex problems.

• You live at the intersection of marketing and user experience and understand how to take users on a complete journey from discovery to adoption and success.

• Expert knowledge of the end to end iterative design process, including how to develop and use personas, journey mapping, content design art direction, wireframing and prototyping, user testing, and high fidelity visuals.

• A scrappy, resourceful approach to projects - you’re proactive and great at self assigning tasks.

• Empathy for the user and about building for everyone - this includes, but is not limited to, accessibility, internationalization and localization, browser and device support.

Tools

• Proficiency with design and prototyping tools (Figma, Photoshop, etc), as well as knowledge of working with various mediums such as web, social, email, blogs etc.

• Knowledge and familiarity with a data informed approach to design. You’ve used tools and resources needed to measure success of design decisions (A/B testing tools, Google Analytics, etc.).

• An appetite for emerging technologies including AI. 

• An appreciation for and familiarity with presentation tools.