Staff Design Manager, Brand and Marketing Design

Posted Jul 8

GitHub is looking for an experienced Staff Design Manager to lead a group of Designers working to bring our brand to life through visual design, web experiences, and systems. The Brand Studio team is responsible for strategizing and executing on new visual identities, smart campaigns, strategic landing pages, branded themes, and in-product experiences. You’ll be mentoring designers and influencing the brand direction as a whole. Collaboration is the key to GitHub’s success, and you will work closely with other designers, project managers, engineers, and company stakeholders to propose design solutions that ensure a successful outcome.

What we are looking for:

Managers at GitHub are people managers and provide technical leadership, so we look for candidates with IC experience in the same field as the people they will be managing. For this specific role we're looking for someone who values the following:

  • Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context to the larger system of the product, as well as ensuring we support experiences for individual features.
  • Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our design system should reflect that., This means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Designing for inclusivity first can lead us to solve problems for the many and open up our product for more people.
  • Creating together: Getting to the right result is our focus. This can come from brand designers or site engineers, and ideally both. Facilitating collaboration between teams and individuals is key so that we continue to evolve the design system alongside the needs of our customers.
  • Progress and impact: Our team often works on the meta and so it's easy to get caught up in the design details. We have to be mindful of this and ensure we keep making decisions and move forward. This means being solutions-oriented and prioritizing progress over correctness when it's the right call.
  • Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between managers and reports and with peers and leadership. It can take time and effort to get there, but it's worth it. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes will yield better results when we can get to the “real talk”.

Responsibilities: 

  • Lead a team of designers to craft brand experiences that are deeply authentic to our developer audience and consistently meet quality standards.
  • Cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging.
  • Provide regular feedback and direction to your team.
  • Partner with design and marketing leadership to prioritize a roadmap that will allow our brand to scale and effectively hit business goals.
  • Ensure your team regularly ships agreed-upon deliverables, looking to exceed expectations when opportunities arise.
  • Ensure the team, the company, and the community has a clear understanding of the direction of projects and the reasoning behind decisions.
  • Build impactful relationships with marketing, product, and other cross-functional partners you’re working with.
  • Live by a growth mindset, constantly finding ways to improve process and tooling to gain efficiencies 
  • Ensure that individuals on the team are learning, growing, and advancing in their respective careers.
  • Recruit and onboard new designers to your team.

Minimum Qualifications:

  • Experience managing a distributed design team at a fast paced company or agency
  • Ability and experience in leading the implementation of complex brand redesigns, websites, and campaigns
  • Experience strategizing, advocating for, and executing new brand ideas and roadmaps that create energy and bring clarity to your team and stakeholders
  • Deep understanding and knowledge of the web as a powerful storytelling medium, and a proven track record of leading teams to explore the cutting-edge possibilities in modern web development, including webGL experiments, CSS art, and innovative JavaScript methodologies

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Passionate about fostering healthy team culture and individual growth
  • Ability to understand broad and complex problems and distill them down into an actionable set of deliverables 
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills
  • Experience leading brand initiatives focused on developer audiences
  • You’ve used GitHub before or are familiar with modern developer workflows

Location: In this role, you can work remotely from anywhere in the following Canadian provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario

#LI-Remote

Who We Are:

As the global home for all developers, GitHub is the complete AI-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across 330+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.

Leadership Principles:

Customer Obsessed - Trust by Default - Ship to Learn - Own the Outcome - Growth Mindset - Global Product, Global Team - Anything is Possible - Practice Kindness

Why You Should Join:

At GitHub, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hubbers) to do the best work of their lives. We've designed one of the coolest workspaces in San Francisco (HQ), where many Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The rest of our Hubbers work remotely around the globe. Check out an updated list of where we can hire here: https://github.com/about/careers/remote

We are also committed to keeping Hubbers healthy, motivated, focused and creative. We've designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we've built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

Please note that benefits vary by country. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask your Talent Partner.