Lead Designer (AI)

About Nextiva

Nextiva is an AI-first company delivering one connected experience from first click to daily use. We serve over 100,000 businesses, and the brand is how most of them meet us. We recently launched a full rebrand — new identity, new visual system, new voice — and we're still in the early stages of rolling it out across every surface and channel.

We're building a marketing team that works differently. AI isn't an experiment for us. It's the default.

About the Role

You'll run day-to-day creative production for Nextiva's marketing department — and fundamentally change how it gets done.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You execute on landing pages, campaign assets, ad creative, video, and brand storytelling — working within the creative direction set by the Creative Director and CMO. But the real job is applying your taste, creativity, and judgment to AI so that the output exceeds what either could produce alone. AI on its own produces average work. You make it exceptional — and in doing so, you automate the mundane creative tasks that used to require headcount, so we can scale campaigns and marketing efforts without growing the team.

Your work starts in AI. Ideas get explored in Claude or Cursor before they ever touch a design application. You use Cursor or Claude to build landing pages, prototype workflows, and ship creative prototypes in code. 

You'll manage a small team of designers and videographers, mentor them on AI-native workflows, and keep the Creative Director and CMO aligned on progress, priorities, and output quality.

We're looking for someone whose taste and creative instincts are what make AI work above average — someone who can take direction, bring real creative thinking to AI-driven workflows, elevate the output, and keep the team moving every day.

What You'll Do

• Design and produce high-quality creative across marketing. Execute on landing pages, campaign creative, digital ads, email, video, and brand moments. Stay close to the work. Concept it, review it, and push it until it meets the bar..
• Build AI-first creative workflows. Redesign how creative gets produced — from ideation through final delivery. Use AI for concepting, copywriting, and creative exploration. Use AI to build and ship pages, assets, and tools. Automate the repetitive production work — ad variations, asset resizing, template-based builds — so the team spends its time on creative decisions, not mechanical ones.
• Manage and develop the creative team. Run the team day-to-day with a strong player-coach approach. Manage and assign work, unblock people, and keep projects on track. Onboard the team to AI-native tools and processes. Set the expectation that AI-generated work is the starting point, not the finish line and show them what it looks like to refine it to a high standard.
• Define what great AI-assisted creative looks like. Document workflows, prompts, and patterns that produce consistently strong results. Share them across the team and the broader marketing org. Raise the bar for everyone, not just your direct reports.
• Steward and expand the brand. We've recently launched a new brand identity. You'll be responsible for maintaining it, enforcing consistency as it rolls out across more surfaces, and expanding the system with considered, tasteful additions as needs arise. New templates, new asset types, new channels — all should feel like they belong to the same brand.
• Connect creative output to busi