Creative Lead - Motion Design, Creative

You’ll be responsible for collaborating closely with cross-functional colleagues to create a wide range of awesome things:

• Working directly with creative peers to develop narrative frameworks and visual metaphors that translate complex financial systems, data, and behaviors into clear, memorable stories across brand, product, and editorial surfaces. These stories and campaign assets come to life across webpages, emails, social media, connected TV, and product—adapting narratives to channel-specific best practices.
• Defining how our brand guidelines come to life as a system, visualizing the ins and outs of complex financial products with clarity, consistency, and just the right amount of flair. 
• Working with our communications and research team to turn data-driven, timely editorial content into engaging, share-able social videos.
• Supporting product designers with subtle in-product implementations that produce outsized impact on our product experience, and helping uplevel interactive prototypes.  

Our motion lead will be a collaborative hands-on doer and a wonder-worker with pixels, who has a knack for putting just the right surprise in just the right spot to get someone to smash that sign-up button.

• You believe in our mission. You know that money can be both intimidating and empowering, and you feel invested in our vision of how well-managed finances can reduce worry and enable our clients to live their lives more fully. You are motivated to make a meaningful impact, to improve the financial system, and to do your part to define a brand that is working to do just that.
• You sweat the small stuff. You recognize that the line between ok and exceptional can be very, very thin, and you’re innately driven to stay on the correct side of it. You make considered decisions in your work, can effectively defend your creative choices, and are ready to revise your opinions in the face of compelling arguments because you care—deeply—about making the work the best it can be. You have a strong point of view, excellent craft, and a knack for knowing when a moment of surprise can meaningfully elevate the experience, and when restraint is the right call.
• You expect your work to serve the team. You know that your way isn’t always the right way, and you're eager to contribute, even when it might be outside your typical skill set. You understand there’s always more you can learn, and you look forward to opportunities to add to your creative arsenal.
• You are resourceful and enterprising. You think like an owner, are solutions-oriented, and adapt quickly to the constraints and challenges of a nimble team in a fast-paced, rapidly growing business.
• You create memorable, engaging things that might-or-might-not look like marketing. You have experience finding the moments that bring a brand to life. You’re happy designing for webpages, in-product interactions, social media, Instagram ads, emails, and everything both in between and beyond. Whether big or small, you look for ways to intersect consumers’ lives to communicate a brand truth in a way that feels relevant, authentic, and memorable.

Impact:

• Pioneer motion’s role at Wealthfront, amplifying our brand, product, and marketing experience through storytelling-driven animation.
• Lead large, complex motion initiatives with a focus on narrative clarity—shaping visual metaphors  and adapting story-telling to the best practices of the channels they’ll live on.
• Foster strong partnerships with marketing, product, design, and research teams to define project goals and scope, while ensuring motion solutions are grounded in audience insight, financial literacy, and intended behavioral outcomes.
• Deliver unique impact through exceptional motion design craft, balancing expressiveness with clarity and scalability, and anticipating longer-term brand system needs.

Leadership:

• Establish new processes that enable the creative team to ideate, prototype, and evaluate motion and interaction concepts, partnering cross-functionally to uncover where motion can unlock greater product and business impact.
• Advocate for motion as a strategic discipline—demonstrating how thoughtful animation improves comprehension, confidence, and decision-making in complex financial experiences.
• Share knowledge, mentor and guide other team members to better understand the possibilities of motion and recognize opportunities where motion can meaningfully clarify abstract or unfamiliar concepts.

Creative Development and Oversight:

• Uplevel creative campaigns and multi-touch experiences from concept to delivery, incorporating stakeholder feedback effectively.
• Take on ambiguous problems by workshopping with peers to explore a wide range of narrative approaches, distilling them into focused, intuitive motion solutions that move from concept to execution.
• Steward Wealthfront’s motion guidelines as a system—proactively identifying opportunities to improve consistency, clarity, and reusability of motion patterns across all touchpoints.
• Confidently lead team meetings and working sessions without managerial oversight—articulating and defending motion design decisions through clear narrative rationale, audience insight, and business context, while driving alignment across stakeholders.

Preferred Experience:

• 8+ years as a motion designer in an agency, studio, or in-house creative team.
• Strong background in consumer driven digital marketing and product storytelling, with experience explaining complex or abstract concepts through motion across web, email, social media, Connected TV, and product surfaces.
• Experience developing motion systems and principles for a brand, consistently adapting effective motion expressions across brand touchpoints.
• Technical motion production skills with After Effects (or similar tools), with fluency in delivering assets and specifications for engineering and production partners. 
• Bonus: 3D modeling and rendering skills.
• Bonus: Illustration or drawing skills.