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Salary: USD 224,000 - 260,000 / annual
Hadrian is building autonomous factories to reindustrialize America, combining AI, advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing to help aerospace and defense companies build rockets, satellites, aircraft, ships, and other mission-critical systems up to 10x faster and at significantly lower cost. The company recently closed a $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation and is rapidly expanding manufacturing capabilities across welding, casting, forging, electronics, additive manufacturing, and more.
You will be Hadrian's first dedicated Brand Designer, owning how the company looks everywhere and building that system while producing the work that carries it. In the near term, the role is heavily hands-on: you will design daily across campaigns in market, recruiting pushes, out-of-home production, and launches. Over time, as you build templates, systems, and support, the balance shifts toward defining the design language and directing people and partners who apply it. The design strategy is genuinely yours to set.
In your first 12 months, you will produce campaign and out-of-home artwork, social and recruiting assets, event and environmental graphics, and presentation design for external audiences. In parallel, you will standardize processes so the same request does not get designed from zero twice. By year-end, you should have a working brand system that others can use independently, a clear point of view on the design language, and a defensible answer to what Hadrian should look like as it scales.
Key responsibilities include: designing across the full range needed (campaign creative, out-of-home artwork, social and digital assets, recruiting collateral, event graphics, merchandise, presentations); working at real volume and speed without quality degradation; preparing production-ready files for large-format specs and print production; art directing photography and video in factories; defining and documenting the brand system (typography, color, layout, photographic direction, iconography); building templates and toolkits for recruiters and site teams; developing visual language for manufacturing representation; establishing an operating model for design requests; owning the creative standard for all visual output including external agency work; and partnering with growth marketing, communications, and talent brand teams.
The subject matter is an unusual advantage: Hadrian makes physical things in real factories—machines, metal, parts with tight tolerances, sparks. Very little of the design vocabulary of technology companies fits; finding what does is the interesting part of this role.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Portfolio: Strong portfolio showing range across digital, print or large format, and environmental or physical work, plus evidence of a system you built (not only individual artifacts)
- Experience: 6+ years in brand or visual design, in-house or agency, including work owned from brief through production
- Craft and speed: Genuinely excellent execution delivered at pace; ability to produce volume without work becoming generic
- Systems thinking: Experience building brand systems, guidelines, or template libraries that others successfully used independently
- Production knowledge: Understanding of print and large-format production, color management, and file preparation
- Direction: Ability to brief and critique external partners clearly; comfort rejecting work that is not good enough
- Ownership and ambiguity: Comfortable being the only designer, setting own standards, and building the function while delivering against a full queue
Differentiators that will set you apart:
- Experience designing for industrial, aerospace, defense, automotive, or hardware companies, or brands where the product is physical
- Environmental and experiential design experience (signage, wayfinding, factory spaces, event build)
- Motion design, video editing, or ability to direct and finish short-form video
- Art direction experience on industrial photo and video shoots
- Experience as a first or early design hire
- Comfort designing performance creative and iterating against results
- Merchandise and apparel design experience, including work with manufacturers
