Art Director Jobs in California

JOB TITLE: AI Native Art Director - Performance Marketing

LOCATION: Remote - PST preferred

DURATION: Through EOY

RATE RANGE: $110-$115/hr

Position Summary: We’re looking for a GenAI-native Art Director to help lead the next generation of performance/direct response marketing at our client. This is a hands-on creative role at the intersection of world-class craft and emerging technology. Generative AI is central to how work gets made on this team. It is the medium we work in every day, across every project, rather than a capability we are beginning to explore. You will originate campaign ideas for digital B2B performance/direct response advertising reaching small and mid-size business audiences, on and off platform, and bring those ideas to life visually inside various generative pipelines, including Weavy, our node-based creative pipeline. From there, you will partner closely with our designers and motion designers, who build the production-ready assets, directing their work and holding the creative standard through to delivery. You will also help shape how our external agency partners work with AI. The people who do well in this role have typically come up through art direction at an advertising agency, and have since made generative AI their primary way of making work, without giving up the craft standard they built along the way. That combination is what we are looking for, and it is what we would most like to see in your portfolio.

Responsibilities:

• The concept. Originate campaign ideas for ongoing digital advertising that are genuinely original and built to perform. That means clear hierarchy, a legible value proposition, and real stopping power at feed scale.
• The art direction. Define the visual approach for your ideas, and hold the creative standard from first concept through to the delivered asset.
• The image generation. Personally produce the imagery for your concepts inside generative pipelines. That covers model selection and chaining, prompt architecture, reference and style systems, iteration and refinement.
• The pipeline. Design and document repeatable GenAI workflows (Weavy node graphs, prompt systems, reference libraries, style locks) that other art directors and our agency partners can pick up and run.
• Art direction through handoff. Brief, direct, and review the designers and motion designers who build the production-ready assets from your generated imagery, protecting the integrity of the idea and the quality of the craft without executing the build yourself.
• Brand integrity in generative output. Hold the line on brand systems, product accuracy, and image quality in AI-generated work, and know precisely where the model falls short and where a human hand needs to take over.
• Agency partnership. Give clear, specific creative guidance to our external agency partners, and hold their output to our standards for concept, craft, and AI-integrated production.
• What's next. Evaluate emerging models and tools as they ship, and fold the ones that earn their place into how the team works.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 5 to 8 years of professional experience as an Art Director at a digital advertising agency (Art Director / Senior Art Director). Brand, performance/direct response, or both. What matters is that you originated the ideas, not which discipline you originated them in.
• Generative AI craft, hands-on, current, and at production scale.
• Demonstrated, current, hands-on generative AI practice as your primary method of producing professional, client-facing, shipped creative. You should be able to walk us through multiple campaigns from the last 12 to 18 months where you personally generated the imagery this way.
• Working fluency across a modern generative stack, including image generation and editing, model chaining, node-based or workflow-based pipelines, and inpainting/upscaling/asset extension. You should have the judgment to choose the right tool for the brief and to build a repeatable pipeline from it, and you should be able to speak specifically and technically about your own workflows, including where they break.
• Proven ability to use these workflows to scale creative output, with a clear point of view on what AI genuinely accelerates and what it still degrades.
• Advertising agency art direction, the craft track.
• A track record of concept-driven campaigns that were both distinctive and effective. We are looking for ideas you owned from the start, not only executions you refined.
• Art direction judgment across design fundamentals, including typography, composition, color, and image-making, strong enough to direct designers and motion designers and to critique their work credibly. This role directs production design rather than executing it.
• Bachelor's degree in Advertising Art Direction, Design, or equivalent professional experience. Your portfolio, not your degree, is what decides this.

BENEFITS SUMMARY: Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate or annual salary only, unless otherwise stated. In addition to base compensation, full-time roles are eligible for Medical, Dental, Vision, Commuter and 401K benefits with company matching.