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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. In the near term, this is a heavily hands-on role producing campaign creative, out-of-home artwork, social and recruiting assets, event and environmental graphics, and presentation design. Over time, as you build templates, systems, and support, the role shifts toward defining design language and directing people and partners who apply it.
Key responsibilities include:
**Produce the work:** Design across the full range needed—campaign creative, out-of-home artwork, social and digital assets, recruiting and employer brand collateral, event and environmental graphics, merchandise, and presentations. Work at real volume and speed without compromising quality. Prepare production-ready files for large-format specs, print production, and vendor requirements. Art direct photography and video capture in factories, including shot lists.
**Build the system:** Define and document the brand system over time—typography, color, layout, photographic and illustrative direction, iconography, and brand behavior across digital, print, environmental, and merchandise. Build templates and toolkits so recruiters, site teams, and marketing can produce on-brand material independently. Develop the visual language for representing manufacturing itself, including machines, parts, processes, and people. Establish an operating model for design requests including intake, prioritization, and review.
**Set direction and hold the standard:** Own the creative standard for Hadrian's visual output, including work by external agencies and partners. Write briefs, give direction, and send work back when it misses. Bring a point of view to leadership on what the brand should be and defend it with reasoning. Partner with growth marketing on performance-driven creative and use feedback as input. Partner with communications and talent brand to maintain consistency.
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. In parallel, you will standardize processes so the same request is not designed from zero twice. By year-end, you should have a working brand system others can use independently, a clear point of view on design language, and a defensible answer to what Hadrian should look like as it scales.
**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)
- 6+ years in brand or visual design, in-house or agency, including work owned from brief through production
- Genuinely excellent execution delivered at pace; ability to produce volume without work becoming generic
- Experience building brand systems, guidelines, or template libraries that others successfully used independently
- Understanding of print and large-format production, color management, and file preparation
- Ability to brief and critique external partners clearly; comfort rejecting work that is not good enough
- Comfort being the only designer, setting your own standards, and building the function while delivering against a full queue
**Nice-to-haves:**
- 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 on industrial photo and video shoots
- First or early design hire experience
- Comfort designing performance creative and iterating against results
- Merchandise and apparel design experience
**ITAR Requirement:** Must be a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, protected individual, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
